Rebecca Cook’s friends and fans follow her adventures on Facebook for several reasons. First, she leads an interesting life: Rebecca works on the popular TV show Z Nation. Second, Rebecca rescues feral cats. And not just any feral cats, mind you—feral cats she’s encountered on the sets of Z Nation!
I asked Rebecca if she would tell us how she came to rescue feral cats while working on a TV show—and how those rescues are working out. She’s in close touch with those cats and former kittens. In fact, one of the current kittens just happens to live in Rebecca’s house. His name is Roscoe.
I grew up in the Spokane Valley but I live just north of downtown Spokane. I got an AAS in radio broadcasting from Spokane Falls Community College and went on to get my BA in theatre from Eastern Washington University.
I worked in local theaters as a costumer for about six years before moving into film costuming about 12 years ago. I worked as an on-set costumer for about seven years, and five years ago I was hired as the Wardrobe Supervisor on Z Nation, Season One.
Z Nation is an action comedy on the Syfy channel. It’s about a group of people trying to survive the zombie apocalypse. We’re compared to The Walking Dead, but we are really the comedic side of the apocalypse.
Season Two, they brought in a new costume designer and she brought her own team, as is typical, so I was without a job. I went to the supervising producer to see if there was another place for me, as I’ve built up many skills behind the camera, and he shocked me with an offer to work in accounting. He explained that they had always wanted to put someone in accounting who had on-set experience. I reminded him I have a theatre degree, but that didn’t scare him.
So, for the past four seasons, I’ve been the assistant accountant in charge of payroll. This office job is what lead to my feral cat rescue opportunities.
Photo by Rebecca Cook
Season Two, one of our editors, Andrew Drazek, found some feral kittens in an abandoned building near our office and started feeding them. We got to talking about it and decided we needed to take action. Neither of us had any experience at feral cat rescue, but we did a bunch of research and enlisted the help of another editor. We researched what it would take to get them neutered and vaccinated, plus any other health care they’d need. We started looking for people to adopt them as well.
One Saturday, we borrowed my brother’s large dog crate and set up an elaborate system with ropes and cars to hide ourselves. It was rather ridiculous in retrospect, but we did catch three kittens on our first try!
I took the kittens to the vet while the guys tried to catch the last kitten and the mom and dad. That was all of the cats we had seen. It must have really spooked the other cats because we didn’t see them for some time. Andrew tried getting permission from the building owner to let us inside, as it seemed there might have been more cats, but he refused due to liability issues. We tried for the rest of the summer to get the other cats, but had no luck at all.
We had made friends with some folks who live around there and liked what we were doing. One of them told us the last kitten had been killed by a coyote, so we finally gave up just before the season ended. But . . . three kittens, enough money to give them all the medical care they needed, and homes for all—it was a huge win for our first attempt at feral cat rescue! They all found homes with people who worked on Z Nation or were relatives of crew that season, and I’m happy to say that they are all doing quite well.
Season Three, we didn’t see any cats around the office, so we didn’t think much about it. We were filming on a farm south of Spokane near Rockford and there was a big litter of kittens that some of our crew adopted. That was about all we did with kittens that year.
In Season Four (2017), our assistant production office coordinator (APOC), Alixandra Saucier, found another little of kittens not far from where we had trapped the others. She actually had some experience with feral cat rescue from when she volunteered with a shelter in L.A. in college. She called me as soon as she saw them and we partnered up to rescue the little brood.
This time, I ordered a couple of live traps and we tried to do things a little more systematically. The beauty of working on a TV show that is full of animal lovers is that we had the complete support of our supervisors and co-workers, and we had a crew of interns to help us out.
That year, we saw four kittens, mom and dad, and another adult cat.
We got permission from a local business owner to set traps behind his store. He loves those cats and feeds them. Being close to the river, he likes having them to help with the rodents, so his only stipulation was that we return the mother and father cats once they were fixed. It was sweet to see how much he truly cared for them. Unfortunately, the owner of the building his business is in put a stop to our trapping because the other businesses felt it was “unsightly” to have the traps there. (Ironic, because we put them under a porch that was surrounded by weeds and litter—we even found human excrement back there once. But our rescue traps were unsightly . . . )
In that time, we did catch the one adult cat we don’t think was the father. Now here’s a fun part of the story. When we took him to the vet, I noticed that his markings matched those of the kitten that supposedly had been killed—and the vet put him at the right age. I believe we rescued the kitten who got away Season Two! He is now happily living as a barn cat in Ritzville on a friend’s farm.
The other cats had been getting older and had migrated back to the original abandoned building from our first litter. We tried again to get permission to go in from the owner, but we never heard back. Things became urgent when a crew came in to start demolition on the building!
Fortunately, the contractor was much more sympathetic and had no desire to take down a building with cats inside, so he let Alix poke around inside a bit.
It was a real feral cat’s dream in there, she said. We doubled up on our efforts and started night trapping. We were very careful to never leave the traps out unless we were going to check them within the hour. You just never know. As we were starting to lose hope, we managed to catch the mama kitty! She was truly our white whale. As promised, we had her fixed and vaccinated, then returned her.
Not long after, we finally caught two of the kittens. We had raised money again, with the generous support of Z Nation fans. Those two got all their medical needs taken care of and went to live with the family of two of our crew members on Mt. Spokane, where they’re having all kinds of adventures.
But that was all we got. Papa kitty and the two other kittens are still around, with a fixed Mama kitty, which seems to have ended the growth of the colony. We did try more trapping, but they had moved back to the zone we were banished from, and two of our traps got stolen from nearby locations. We got a net, but never had occasion to use it. The business owner still feeds them and looks after them, so it’s not a total loss.
Finally, last season, the show was in one of the filthiest locations we have ever had the pleasure of staging an apocalypse in. It’s a scrapyard in Spokane, which is perfect for our show, but tough on people.
I think it was the second day in when one of our crew members sent me a photo of a kitten hiding in the debris. I sent it along to Alix and we were ready for another season of kitten catching!
She went out and talked with the crew that worked there, as well as the owner. Apparently, the employees had been feeding the cats—they really liked having them around. The owner was very happy to let us catch them and re-home them all. The employees agreed to help us if we promised to leave the big orange cat because he was their favorite. One of the guys wanted to adopt the black kitten.
There were three adults (mom, dad, and Big Orange) and four kittens. We agreed to their terms and Alix set about getting the traps put out. Some of our own crew agreed to help check the traps while they were on-set.
Our first catch was the mother cat, whom we immediately took in to be fixed and vaccinated. The vet told us that she was still nursing, but recommended we fix her right away and keep trying for the kittens, which we did. We managed to catch the dad and three kittens pretty quickly. They were old enough not to need to nurse anymore, so that was a relief, but the fourth kitten was really elusive. Of course, it was the one kitten one of our own crew specifically hoped to adopt.
After a week, we had finished filming there and the crew moved on, but Alix continued checking the traps, with help from the employees at the scrapyard. It seemed we weren’t going to get the last little guy, but when we finally decided it was our last day, he gave in and we caught him. It felt like a bit of a miracle, honestly! Dad and mom cat are also enjoying barn cat life with our Season Four adult rescue (Z Kitty, he’s called now). Two other crew member adopted two of the kittens . . . and that left me with Roscoe.
I had been thinking about adopting a kitten for some time, but it never quite worked out. I wasn’t even going to keep him when we found out the kittens might have FIV, since I have another cat, Nahla, but every other home I found for him didn’t work out and, well, the longer he stayed, the more I fell in love with him. After extensive research about the actual risk of FIV infection to Nahla, I realized the risk seemed virtually none.
These kittens pretty much drained our resources since we didn’t do any more fundraising, really. And, as my vet put it, they were filthy little things with FIV and two types of parasites. But everyone is doing well now and thriving!
Roscoe has been such a huge hit with my Facebook friends, I put together a calendar of his crazy photos in hopes of raising a little seed money for our next feral rescue. I don’t know if we will have another season of Z Nation, but I do know we won’t turn our backs on cats in need, so I’m sure some will find us again in the future.
Rebecca Cook produces and directs short films; she is the owner of Thundering Kitten Productions. She is on the board of IATSE Local 488 (film crew union of the PNW), a board member for Spokane Film Project, founder of Spokane Women in Film & TV (SWIFT), and on the Leadership Council of Washington Filmworks (a Washington State Film Incentive organization). Rebecca produces three original play festivals annually at Spokane’s Stage Left Theater. She is about to start her eighth season as a living history performer in the Campbell House Holidays at Spokane’s Museum of Art and Culture, and she is currently working on recording her 78th audiobook.
Thundering Kitten Productions
https://www.facebook.com/thunderingkitten/
