URBAN TAILS -  INTRODUCTION
 By Sara Neeley

Behind too many office buildings, theaters, restaurants, or shopping malls lives one or more families of stray cats. A similar scene unfolds near any dumpster or natural source of water. Our parents called them alley cats. “Strays,” we mutter, although the correct term may actually be feral. A stray cat is one that has had contact with people at some point in its life and may now be lost or, worse, abandoned. A feral cat has been completely alone and wild since birth. Regardless of what we call them, there are so many strays that we are immune to their existence. It’s not that we ignore them; we rarely even see them. As with the human homeless, they remain nameless and faceless, and many of us prefer it that way. In fact, if we really look in their eyes and recognize their hunger and fear as primal instincts that we, too, can have, it stirs our own guilt and anxiety.