Backstory: Cage Hemingway's cats?!

Charlie Chaplin saves his best performances for the tourists' cameras. Ava Gardner is known to be a bit of a prima donna. And reports of Mark Twain's demise have been exaggerated, though he's a little older these days and requires help shaving.

Stroll the grounds of the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in the heart of Key West and it's not uncommon to find film stars from the golden era rubbing around your legs or dozing peacefully on Papa's old bed. These are the famous six-toed cats – descendants of the author's own beloved pet, Snowball. And they're now the center of a dispute that has set the fur flying between the museum's owners and the US Department of Agriculture.

With Trevor Howard, a black-and-white furball sprawled and snoring at his feet in an air-conditioned office, museum chief executive Mike Morawski explains that government bureaucracy threatens to curtail the languorous, feline idyll.

Under the section of the Animal Welfare Act that deals with "animal exhibitors," the USDA has determined that the 46 resident free-range felines are display animals like those in a zoo, and must be caged.

And Mr. Morawski has taken the USDA to court, asking a federal judge in Miami whether Hemingway's cats must be licensed under the Act. "It's absolutely ludicrous. We are the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum telling people about his house and property. The cats just live here. And if we are an exhibitor, why in the world does our one-acre site, surrounded by a six-foot wall, not serve as containment? We need clarity."

It's perfectly clear, says USDA spokesman Jim Rogers, "It doesn't matter if you have an elephant in your yard if you keep it as a pet, but if you are exhibiting an animal, whether or not you are charging money, then you need a license."

Why now, 42 years after the museum – with cats – started operating?

The USDA cites a 2003 complaint that cats were leaving the grounds and creating a neighborhood nuisance. While the agency won't name the source of the complaint, some fingers point to the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, whose president, Gwen Hawtof, admits to "interactions" with the museum about roaming cats.

After three years of discussion between the museum and USDA, Morawski says he fulfilled every recommendation from inspectors, including placing an angled fence atop the perimeter wall, but the agency still refused to issue a license. So he sued.

Anything to do with constriction of free will – animal or human – always raises emotion in this independent outpost. This city hired an official "rooster catcher" two years ago to deal with more than 2,000 problem chickens running free through town. But the rooster catcher resigned within six months, complaining of abuse from a fowl-friendly public. Citizens of the Conch Republic, as residents of the Florida Keys like to call themselves following a brief but well-publicized mock secession from the US in 1982 over immigration checkpoints, also take a dim view of federal government muscling in on local affairs.

"You'd think the city has bigger problems than this to deal with," says Tom Coward, owner of the Andrews Inn guesthouse that borders the Hemingway museum. "We certainly didn't complain about the cats. In fact, I miss them coming into the garden since the museum put the fence up. They're not a nuisance, they're neutered and they're well cared for."

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