True cat lover: Turkish woman owns 600 felines

Akalin with one of her cats

Feeding time is an adventure

January 15, 1998
Web posted at: 9:09 p.m. EST (0209 GMT)

ISTANBUL, Turkey (CNN) -- Turkan Akalin makes the old woman who lived in a shoe in the nursery rhyme look like an underachiever.

The old woman "had so many children, she didn't know what to do."

Akalin has 600 cats -- and one dog -- and she knows just what to do. She gives them a home -- four apartments, in fact -- and she feeds them. All of them.

Akalin feeds her cats
	2.1M/27 sec./320x240 1M/27 sec./160x120 QuickTime movie

It costs Akalin and her 59-year-old husband $2,000 a month and requires the help of two assistants to feed the cats.

She and her husband, a retired clerk who is himself a pet lover, now share two apartments, moving from one to the other. The couple, who have no children, had to sell their previous houses to afford their hobby.

Akalin began this obsessive love affair with cats 35 years ago when she moved from Adana, in southern Turkey, to Istanbul.

Feeding time is an adventure

Feline feeding frenzy

She took in 30 cats because she couldn't bear to see them sick and lonely on the streets, and apparently has been doing it ever since.

Feeding time at Akalin's apartments makes feeding time at the zoo look like brunch at the Four Seasons. She sprinkles food on the front steps for a few cats, then pushes her way inside where hordes of hungry, meowing cats cluster around her like a scene from a Hitchcock movie.

She sprinkles dry cat food on the couch, on the floor, on tables, even on top of the television, then sits on the floor and plays with them before leaving.

There was no word on who empties the litter boxes.

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