Cheryl Rogers is a relative newbie to Queensborough, having moved to the island community in 1993.
During her time in New Westminster, Rogers has established herself as one of the city's leading animal advocates and been dubbed the "barefoot accountant" by some. I wanted to get to know this community-minded nonconformist - who shuns shoes and cheers for the Boston Bruins - a little bit better, so we sat down and had a chat.
Theresa McManus: Can you introduce yourself?
Cheryl Rogers: I live in Queensborough, here in New Westminster. I am a self-employed chartered accountant, which is my vocation, but I spend most of my time with my avocations, which is animal rescue in various guises.
TM: How did you become involved in animal rescue?
CR: Well, I've always been one of those "saving the cats and the dogs on the way home from school" people. Even as a child. I've always had pets my whole life. I was one of the founders of the Royal City Humane Society. At the end of 1994 there was a little blurb in The Record about people who were interested in the cat overpopulation problem in New Westminster. That was when we started the Royal City Humane Society.
TM: What was your role with the society?
CR: At the beginning I was the treasurer. I was the treasurer all the way through until I resigned. In the beginning I mostly did treasurer, the actual bookwork, because I was fairly busy. But, as time went on, I started getting more involved with helping out at the cat shelters, helping out with cat trapping and maintaining feral cat colonies and basically helping out with fundraising, going to community events, etc. etc. So I became a Jane of all trades.
TM: Why is it important to you to take care of these feral cats?
CR: The feral cats, they exist because we throw our cats away and they are not fixed. Feral cats come out of litters born to stray cats. Basically they should be pets, but they have never been around humans. I feel we have a responsibility toward them. So what we do is trap/neuter/ release. We will trap them, test them for diseases and then fix them, assess them - if it looks like they may be adoptable, they come into the shelter system, and otherwise they are put back into a maintained colony.
TM: You do have rescue dog of your own. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
CR: I have a rescue dog. Her name is Suzie. She's a pit bull, and I actually brought her home with a bunch of other dogs from Katrina in 2005. I went to Hurricane Katrina, and later I brought the dogs up after I had been home for a month or so. They didn't have anywhere to go, so B.C. took eight pits and pit bull crosses, and so did Alberta.
TM: That's a breed of dog that has garnered quite a reputation. Do you have any thoughts?
CR: Pit bulls really have a bad rap. I was going through some old newspaper articles from the '90s, and it was all about Rottweilers and how terrible they were and how we had to ban the breed. I find that there are very similar articles now about the pit bulls. There are bad dogs of all sorts of breeds that are dangerous to humans, but most dogs are not dangerous to humans. Pit bulls were not bred to be dangerous to humans. In actual fact, they were bred to not be dangerous to humans. They were bred for fighting. If you want to grab your dog out of a fighting ring, you do not want your dog to turn on you. My dog, I can do whatever I want to that dog, and she will not react.
TM: Tell me a little bit about where you grew up.
CR: I was born in Burnaby Hospital, lived most of my younger years in South Burnaby, lived a year in Richmond when I was six, lived five years down in the States - four in Boulder, Colorado and one in Fullerton, California - and then came back up here to the South Slope and attended McPherson Park and Burnaby South. I brought animals home pretty much in all of those places.
TM: You mention the States. How did that come about?
CR: My dad went down there to get his PhD. We all went down there with him. It was an interesting time to be in a university town - the late '60s, early '70s. I think it affected me. The hippie culture was quite big on campus and off campus - more in Boulder. In California, my main memory from California was the Symbionese Liberation Army and Patty Hearst. That was big news down there. It was California. Fullerton is just beside Anaheim. We lived about 20 minutes away from Disneyland. That's what I always tell people.
TM: You say that living in the United States influenced you - how so?
CR: I am not really a conformist. I am an accountant, but I work out of my home. I don't earn a lot of money at accounting because I am too busy doing charitable stuff with the animals. I am also involved with the community groups here in Queensborough. I think it affected me - the whole hippie, counterculture kind of lifestyle. I think it gave me a way of living, including not really wearing shoes or being impressed by proper dress and things like that.
TM: Tell me about the shoeless thing?
CR: I don't like shoes. They pinch my toes. They are not comfortable, so I try not to wear shoes. This started when I was a kid. - As I have gotten older and I have more control over my own life, I wear them less and less and less.
TM: How often do you wear shoes?
CR: When it snows, when I have to - if I am going into a restaurant, that type of thing.
TM: Does it hurt or do you injure your feet when you go shoeless?
CR: People actually worry - they think it's not healthy or that I could get hurt. You watch where you going when you are in bare feet. If you wear bare feet a lot you get very tough soles on your feet so a lot of things that would bother a normal person that wears shoes doesn't really bother me. I don't have any problems with my feet. It's actually quite healthy, bare feet. When I play field hockey I wear soccer boots.
TM: How do people react to your bare feet?
CR: Kids with my feet, kids are great! They look at my feet all the time and then they will say 'Mommy, Mommy, she's not wearing any shoes.' I'll see the kid and I'll say, 'Do you like my shoes?' They look and I go, 'They're invisible.' They say, 'Nooo.' It's funny because the parents say to the kids, don't ask, don't notice. - It's something that sets me apart. There are sometimes when I am out and about, if someone sees me and they normally see me, say, doing animal things and they see me out of context, if they wonder if it's me, they'll look at my face - and then they'll look at my feet. If it matches they know it's me.
TM: You've lived in Queensborough since 1993 and say it suits you - how so?
CR: In Queensborough - it's like I always say to people, if I was rich, I'd be considered eccentric. But I'm not, so I may be considered odd or strange or weird. And in Queensborough, that's OK. We have people that sort of march to their own drummer. And everybody appreciates that and allows it and accepts it, so it's quite a nice place to be. It's a good community. I do have a feral cat colony in my backyard, so it allows me to do that. It is quite centrally located, so it's easy to get places if you have to go somewhere to respond to a disaster or something.
TM: Other than Hurricane Katrina, have you gone elsewhere?
I went to the fires in 2003 up in the Interior, in Barriere and Kamloops. I went to Katrina. Most of the other stuff I have just done locally, so I attend apartment fires in New West. When we had the bomb scare on Royal Avenue, I helped the animals out of that. I am a trainer for CDART - Canadian Disaster Animal Response Team. I go around the province training other communities so that they can have an animal plan and people to help the animals.
TM: You were one of the founders of the Royal City Humane Society but have since left it and are involved with something new. Tell me about it.
CR: Some of the former directors of the humane society and a couple of other animal people, we started an animal group that we call VEATA, which is the Pacific Volunteer Education and Assistance Team for Animals Society. The reason we started another group was we really wanted to concentrate on education so that we can get people to understand what responsible pet ownership is and how to be humanely treating animals and to coexist with the wildlife that we have to coexist with because we are in their habitat - that type of thing.
Our long-term goal is to get this type of education included in the regular education system so every grade you get some of this as part of your curriculum.
We also try to provide financial assistance to low-income pet owners, usually not spay and neuter because there are groups that do that like the Royal City Humane Society. -
The other thing we do is provide, in association with New Westminster Emergency Pet Services, which is the city program, we also help provide temporary emergency shelter for pets of people in crisis. That would be for families fleeing abuse, going into transition houses, people having an emergency to the hospital, detox, treatment centre, those kinds of situations. Also if someone is evacuated because of a fire or something like that. If they don't have any place for their animals to go, we will foster them temporarily.
TM: I understand you're celebrating a milestone this year?
My mom will be 70 this year. I will be 50 - one-half a century. My grandma will be 100. My grandmother and my mother have the non-gray hair gene. So she's going to be twice my age - I've got a deal with her that she is supposed to at least try and have as much gray hair as me now that she is going to be 100 and I am going to be 50. She just naturally is not gray yet. She has offered to dye her hair gray just so she wouldn't have less than me.
TM: Will you stay here?
CR: I fondly say I live in a shack in a swamp. My shack is not getting any younger. I don't know if I have to move from this particular house, if there is another place in Queensborough at this time. Can I move within the community and live this life I have, with the feral cat colony outside and the multiple cats inside and the pit bull.
I'd like to stay. This is home. I did think I was going to have to move a few years back, and I didn't realize how upset it would have made me to leave. I'm still not ready to leave - I like it here. I like New West. I like Queensborough.
