"There were four shootings this week," Janet Joy Mattice told me during her criminal arraignment on Halloween, shaking her gray head disgustedly. "And they are on me about feeding cats."
And Then They Were Upon Her
But "on her" they were. Janet (who goes by her middle name, Joy) had a perfect record except for one minor traffic violation. She is the widow of a retired Minneapolis police officer and, during the administration of Governor Rudy Perpich, Mattice received a proclamation in her honor for years of work in the area of animal welfare including changes made in state law as a result of her efforts. In the photo above, Mattice holds a copy of the proclamation in question.
If you talk to Mattice for any length of time she will soon tell you about her rescues of dogs and cats that have been hung, doused with fuel, and all manner of terrible things that happen to the animals she loves and to which she has virtually devoted her whole life. Mattice was born in 1936, so that's a lot of life.
Though Mattice had been helping strays for a long time it appears the mortgage crisis in North Minneapolis has, in the last few years, produced a "perfect storm" of animal overpopulation versus Janet Joy Mattice's energetic and admittedly stubborn attempts to help stray animals. Mattice uses traps to catch cats, has the cats spayed or neutered, and then releases the cats again. Mattice points out (with the paper documentation to prove it) that...
