How many circuses allow you to adopt the types of animals performing? At least one – The Amazing Acro-Cats!
This feline-ominal group travels and purrforms in many cities each year to support their 501c3 organization, Rock Cats Rescue. The Amazing Acro-Cats will be showing off their incredible tricks and talents at Creative Alliance from July 17 – July 28, 2024.
Without littering the article with too many pawful puns, Baltimore Fishbowl will share all we learned about the group from Samantha Martin, founder of Rock Cats Rescue and trainer of all the cats in The Amazing Acro-Cats show.
Readers may already be familiar with the Acro-Cats from an episode focused on them in the Netflix series “Cat People” from 2021. Martin’s story began much earlier than that.
Since she was a child, she was involved with animals, and as an adult her profession was wildlife education. In 2004, she trained her own cats to play musical instruments, and The Rock Cats were born. While she toured the country with her wildlife education job, she brought her trained cats with her, giving a sneak peek to interested passers-by, who were blown away.
The Rock Cats’ career started small, as many bands do, and Martin took a detour in 2009 when she began fostering kittens.
“I wanted to add to the troupe, but I wanted it to be a rescue cat,” Martin said. Performing and tour life is not for every feline, after all. She connected with an organization that sent her to an intake facility she described as “not cushy at all.”
“I mean, they threw me into the trenches…. They sent me to the kitten room and said, ‘Well, whoever you don’t take home from today will be euthanized.’ And I was like, ‘What?’”
Martin left with 12 kittens that day with zero formal training and no cat medical background. They all had respiratory illness and needed bottle feeding. Not knowing anything about isolation, her own cats got sick and one of them needed medicating, too.
This was the turning point for her, though, because she realized that she could use her Rock Cats show to help get kittens adopted, too, even neonates (kittens who need bottle-feeding) who might normally be abandoned or euthanized because of the amount of attention they need.
Not only does Martin dedicate her time to helping to save neonates until they are old enough to be adopted, but she also teaches every cat she fosters and brings along to her shows for adoption at least one simple parlor trick to show off to the humans who come to see them.
“All cats can be trained at any age. The only limitation is their physical ability,” Martin said. “Of course, a 17-year-old cat is not going to be able to balance on a ball and climb up a tall tower or do really long jumps, because they’re going to have some arthritis at that point. They’re going to have some limited mobility. But you can teach them do some basic things, like a high five, a sit pretty, and the most important thing, which is the whistle recall.”
The whistle recall only takes three times to teach a cat, according to Martin, and is imperative especially in an emergency. If one needs to get out of the house quickly and bring the animals, the whistle recall will bring your cats running to you. If your cat is an outdoor cat and you need to bring them inside, the whistle sound will travel farther than the sound of your voice or shaking a treats bag.
All of these things increase the chances of adoption and disabuse people of the notion that cats are not trainable.
Now, The Amazing Acro-Cats Show includes the Rock Cats and lots of other seemingly impawsible stunts in their catalog, and Martin brings them and their adoptable friends to Baltimore this week for an 11-day run at Creative Alliance.
Martin’s current human crew includes an Acro-human assistant, Ashley Murnan, and another Acro-human assistant who happens to be a vet tech, Karma Hurworth. They have 12 Acro-Cats in their show and began the summer tour with 11 additional adoptable cats.
Of those 11, only three are still available for adoption now, so Martin’s mission of finding cats their furever home continues with great success. Fear not, though! Martin and the Acro-Cats always team up with a local animal rescue organization in each city they visit, and for their Baltimore stop they are collaborating with Rise Above Animal Rescue. Rise Above will receive a portion of the proceeds from the Acro-Cats shows, and they will have a table at the Creative Alliance shows for attendees to learn about their rescue operations.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Martin toured 9 or 10 months out of the year. Now she tours 6 or 7 months per year, the summer tour being the longest. Their first stop was in Richmond, Virginia; next is Baltimore; then Boston; Portland, Maine; and Philadelphia.
They travel in a 45-foot 2001 Prevost bus with the Acro-Cats and the cats to be adopted. A bus is safer than an RV because it has a steel frame to protect the occupants, and it is made to travel across the country.
The Netflix special details the hardship Martin and her team experienced when their previous driver of four years stole their bus, stripped the wrap off the front and took an axe to the inside to rebuild it for some other use. He’d completely disassembled all the custom apparatus Martin had built for the cats’ travel, safety, and rest so that when police eventually recovered the vehicle, it had to be completely rebuilt. Thankfully some fans chipped in to help restore it, but Martin was never able to get the funds to bring the bus back to its original Acro-Cats glory.
That doesn’t dim her enthusiasm for the life she’s chosen and the cats who are her family.
“One of the most rewarding parts is to be able to spend time with these animals,” Martin said. “It’s just such an enrichment, and it’s an enriching lifestyle. …It is not for everybody. Some people are like, ‘I could never live like that.’ And for me, I love it. I wake up. I love that purring and I get to travel the country and see cool roadside attractions.”
“The best part of the day is … we finish the show, we’re in the bus, got a movie to watch, and we’re covered in cats,” Martin said.
The Amazing Acro-Cats will be at Creative Alliance from July 17 – July 28. Purchase tickets for their performances by clicking this link.
Make sure to get there early so you can visit the Rise Above Animal Rescue table, the Acro-Cats information and adoption area, and of course, there will be a cat bar. That does not mean a bar where cats will drink cat-tinis. It does, however, mean there will be drinks for humans, with names like Catbernet, Tomcat Collins, and more puns that this author wishes she’d thought of herself.
