For a day, adversaries’ snarls become meows

“Dear colleague,” began the letter from a public relations firm advertising a television client.

Arrrrrgggggh.

We are not their colleagues. We are not partners with them in a crusade to glorify and promote the TV industry, any more than it’s the role of news media to embrace the White House’s efforts to deify the president.

Publicists and the press have an adversarial relationship predicated on conflicting agendas written in stone: They polish, we dull.

There are rare times, however, when our interests and ambitions converge on a personal level.

Times when we turn the other cheek, ignore past turbulence and meet as peaceful neutrals in a Switzerland of the moment.

Times when we put aside strife and call a temporary truce the way some British and German soldiers were said to have done in World War I when they left their trenches on Christmas Eve and sang carols together, then resumed the carnage the next morning.

What follows is one of those momentous times, when bygones were temporarily bygones and a common denominator bonded us and pushed out the clutter of mistrust. The occasion?

Cats!

“Mind carrying the water?” asked Nancy Carr, CBS vice president for communications, on a sweltering Sunday morning when the sun burned down like a laser.

Inside the trunk of her luxury car were the tools of her trade. Not show biz, cat biz: Two large plastic feeders, two gallon containers of water, sacks of food, a wire trap large enough for a raccoon and a copy of the Los Angeles Times.

To line the bottom of the trap, naturally.

At least it wasn’t a certain TV column. Not on this day, when Carr and I were pals.

She loves animals. I do, too. She is mad for cats, and so am I.

I don’t recall how we discovered this shared passion that brought us together today, she the cat-adoring activist spending Sunday mornings far from her home doing tough duty on behalf of feral and abandoned domestic felines, and me the cat-addicted observer with a notebook and pen.

But here we were outside what Carr asked me to describe only as a “Southern California entertainment venue.” A publicist declining to publicize.

“I don’t want to say where we are because I want to protect the cats here,” she said. “And I don’t want people moving out [of their homes] and saying, ‘I can leave my cats down there.’ ” Many already have, unfortunately, and the offspring of these cats become feral. There are 1.3 million feral cats in Los Angeles alone, says the Feral Cat Caretakers Coalition (feralcatcaretakers.org), whose founder and president, Dona Baker, is Carr’s mentor in this work. Grass-roots feral cat caretakers like Carr also run in the multitudes and inevitably need money to help with expenses.

Cats, shmats. What’s going on here? “They’re little souls,” Carr said. “There out here because of human neglect, because someone decided to abandon them.”

Carr tries to humanely scoop them up when possible, take them to a vet who’s open Sundays, then return them and care for them if they can’t be adopted out.

She pays for food, supplies and vet services herself, she said, to the tune of about $5,000 a year. Her husband, Ronnie Bradford, an executive news producer at KNX radio, shops for cat stuff, loads her car and “honors what I do,” she said. With limits. It turns out that he’s, er, allergic.

Nonetheless, the couple’s cat brood at home numbers six, one of which “I trapped right here,” Carr said. “I took her to a vet, got her spayed and put her in my bathroom. We were going to put her back, but she was so sweet.”

What a difference two days make. Carr ended her CBS workweek Friday editing press releases for the network’s participation in the annual Television Critics Assn. tour underway in Los Angeles. Now she was in another galaxy, far from prime time.

How does she reconcile her CBS life -- in a high-pressure, intensely competitive environment where she’s considered no softie -- with purring over and playing mommy to homeless cats?

Carr struggles to answer, but there is a connection: She traps strays and has them spayed or neutered, which is what CBS would like done to some of those who write about its programs.

In her red T-shirt, jeans and sandals, Carr is no stereotypical cat lady. She’d been picking up and caring for strays in her neighborhood for 15 years before she began making these 10-mile Sunday drives to the “entertainment venue” after encountering a cat there she couldn’t get out of her mind. It had a bad eye.

“I came here (for an event) once and saw this helpless little kitten, a gray and black tabby, who was begging for food,” she said. “I couldn’t bear the thought of him down there starving. It took me months and months to trap him.” Her friend Teri Corigliano, a publicist for the CBS series “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” adopted the cat and named him Little Bittle, and another friend, Judy Strother, paid for eye surgery.

But enough of this chat, and on to the job at hand. Out came Carr’s big, cumbersome trap, into which she put bits of canned mackerel as bait. She carried the trap behind a chain link fence and set it down in a narrow opening between tall stacks of wooden flats.

Next she removed a feeder that she had wedged into an even narrower, pitch-black space the previous Sunday and replaced it with another containing dry food, putting a plate of soft food in front. Then she walked around a thicket of shrubs to a large, enclosed box with cat-sized holes in the side, opened the combination lock on its door, removed a feeder there and crawled half inside to clean the space with paper towels. She filled a new feeder with water and put it in.

Carr knows of two cats now living here but believes there could be as many as 10. Would any show up? “The chances are not real good right now,” she said. “It’s easier to trap cats at dawn or dusk.” But less safe for the trapper, who returned to her car and waited.

“I bring scripts to read if I’m trapping and I get bored,” she said.

How refreshing it would be if there was a “reality” TV series chronicling people who do good works, like cat saviors, instead of attention being lavished on the usual self-serving, egoistic crowd trying for fame or big bucks.

What is Carr’s payback? “To know I’ve saved lives and that I’ve encouraged other people to open their eyes and see what’s right in front of them,” she said. Animals who are suffering may be right in front of them.

And frustration? “Just knowing how many animals that you can’t help,” she said. Too many to count.

An hour went by before Carr checked the trap. No cat, and the fish hadn’t been touched. She unhinged and removed the trap and packed up. It was about 11:30 when she drove off after another heroic Sunday morning. We had sung our carols together, so to speak. But Monday we’d be back in the trenches.

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard .rosenberg@latimes.com.