OTTAWA, Ontario – Coal, the last surviving member of a colony of cats that thrived for decades outside Canada’s parliament and became popular with tourists, has died. He was believed to be 17.

A Facebook page devoted to Coal said he had had an aggressive form of cancer that had spread to his lungs and received a veterinarian-administered death on July 8.

Little is known about Coal’s early life. But Danny Taurozzi, Coal’s adoptive owner, said it appeared he had been left at the informal colony as a kitten.

There, Coal joined as many as three dozen cats who lived in crude shelters vaguely resembling the neighbouring Centre Block building of Parliament.

Mr Taurozzi was among a small group of volunteers who cleaned and maintained the shelters, in untamed bush behind a wrought-iron fence, just steps from the speaker’s entrance to the House of Commons.

When the cats were not sleeping, they would sometimes allow themselves to be petted, he said.

The colony, which was also frequented by raccoons looking for a free meal, gradually became almost as large an attraction as the rest of Parliament Hill, and a mandatory stop for busloads of tourists.

Mr Taurozzi said that the Dalai Lama had been among the dignitaries who had paid a visit to the cats. Another visitor, he added, was Stephen Harper when he was Canada’s prime minister.

“He was a cat lover, and his wife was a mega cat lover,” Mr Taurozzi said. “These cats are stress relievers, so they’d have a lot of visitors.”

Coal and the other members of the colony, however, never enjoyed the formal status of Larry, the cat now serving his sixth British prime minister at 10 Downing Street.

Larry, a British domestic tabby cat, serves as the unofficial Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street.

PHOTO: AFP

Alan MacEachern, a professor at Western University in London, Ontario, who has done some research on the parliamentary cats, said that some cats were on official mousing duties inside the Parliament buildings during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

But it appeared to be a very on-and-off relationship.

A news report about a small fire in Parliament in 1924 blamed mice for the blaze and suggested that the incident would have been prevented “if a recent order banishing cats from the buildings had not been put into effect”.

The order may have later been lifted.

The Globe and Mail reported in 1936 that the cats’ “love-making, unmelodious and raucous, echoed through the dignified halls of legislature”.

Twenty-eight years later, The Vancouver Sun said that the “lusty cats” Peregrine, Poppet, and Tobermory had been removed from their home under a flight of steps on Parliament Hill and placed in a farm under the orders of the deputy minister of public works.

Mouse traps eventually put the cats out of work and out of the legislative buildings for good.

After groundskeepers informally fed cats on Parliament Hill for several years, Mr MacEachern said, a site overlooking the Ottawa River was set aside for the cat colony in 1970, and the shelters were built.

“There was something delightfully incongruous finding this within 50 yards (approximately 45 metres), maybe less, of Centre Block, being so clearly not fully official,” said Mr MacEachern, who was a regular visitor when he lived in Ottawa. “It wasn’t done to the same architectural standards of Centre Block, for example.”

The colony had main caretakers who were not paid and were helped by other volunteers, including Mr Taurozzi. Before pet food companies began making donations, Mr Taurozzi estimated that the food bill was C$ 7,000 (S$6,548), currently about $5,000, a year.

After joining the colony, Coal appeared on a Japanese television network’s game show, as well as in an American documentary about feral cats.

In 2013, the federal public works department sought to move the colony because of renovation works on Parliament Hill, offering the volunteers another site.

But a spay-and-neutering program had reduced the group to just four cats, including Coal. All were adopted, and the colony was dismantled.

Coal did not entirely leave public life behind. In addition to sometimes “commenting” on public affairs on social media, he ran for prime minister in 2015 on an animal welfare campaign. (The effort was doomed from the outset as Canadians don’t vote directly for prime minister.)

He was also a regular visitor at a home for World War II and Korean War veterans.

When Coal developed cancer, an online campaign raised just over C $15,000 to cover the cost of treatment, helping supplement pet insurance and what Mr Taurozzi spent out of his own pocket.

Mr Taurozzi said the ashes of the other three final members of the colony had been sprinkled near its former site, “but I’m keeping Coal’s ashes”.

“Most of his life he was as an inside adopted cat, so it’s fitting that he stays with me.” NYT

More on this topic