An Open Letter to my Cat’s Former Owner

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6 Responses

  1. DensityDuck says:

    <3 Thank you for sharing this with us. I'm glad you found Poof again. When we had movers come through, we were so paranoid that our cat would escape that we put up at three different signs on the door to the cat room telling them to NOT OPEN THE DOOR FOR ANY REASON, and in fact we considered taping it shut…the little bastard hates the thought of being shut in anywhere and has been known to leap at least twelve feet between stairwell windows to get out!Report

  2. Jaybird says:

    After Dear Chumky (the cat that came with the marriage) passed, we adopted Cecilia from the Petsmart. She was one of the sweetest cats ever. For the first couple of months we (I) came home, she hid when she heard the clomping of boots on the steps. “Where’s Cecilia?” we’d ask and look around and discovered that she was under the couch. She’d look at us and say “Oh! It’s you!” and come out and be happy to see us and mmmmmrp and ask for treats.

    It took about half a year for her to greet us when she heard the clomp clomp instead of going under the couch.

    I’m glad we ended up with her instead of those boot-wearers who had her before.Report

  3. Aaron David says:

    Our cats came from my mother-in-law, and we took them in when she died. But our little dog, Barnaby, was a rescue. And it is not that he is scared of anything, but he came out of a hoarding situation, and often he acts like an ex-POW.

    We give him the best life we can.

    Great post.Report

  4. dragonfrog says:

    Thanks for this – the piece, and taking in the cats.

    Who knows why the former owners were “too busy” to take care of the cats. Too busy taking vacations? Too busy just keeping it together against mental illness? Didn’t want to go into detail about their impending homelessness to some stranger at the shelter? One thing that’s clear: the cats are lucky to have you.

    My parents’ cat is similarly adopted from a cat rescue organization. She’s lucky to have my parents – I’ve seldom met a more unpleasant beast (and I’m generally quite fond of cats) but they love her and take good care of her.Report

  5. KenB says:

    I volunteered for a number of years at a cat shelter. The second-worst part of the gig was not being able to adopt all my favorites; but the worst part was hearing all the stories of how the cats ended up at the shelter — neglect, abandonment, even cruelty. A commonly-heard phrase there was “People suck”. But we did have some wonderful transformations similar to Poof’s, after a few months of TLC.Report

  6. fillyjonk says:

    The cat we had when I was growing up (from about age 7 to about age 18) was a Siamese cat named Sam that I guess today we’d call a rescue cat. Friends of my parents knew that their old Siamese had died and maybe they were ready for a new cat, and Sam needed someone – the first house he lived in, there were big dogs that chased him and harassed him. He was passed on to a second house where he was kept alone in the basement. So he was kind of traumatized when he came to us. The first month, he stayed under my mom’s dresser. The only way we knew we had a cat was that at night he came out to eat food and drink and use the litter box.

    After about a month, he moved from the dresser to under my parents’ bed. One day my mom was reaching under there for her slippers and she happened to touch Sam. Instead of moving away, he let her touch him, and she started petting him. He started purring.

    Not too long after that, he came out from under the bed. And eventually became the cat we all loved for the rest of his life. He’d let me (and later, my brother) carry him around; he liked to chase toys you would drag on a string. He liked scrambled eggs and would sit by the table when we had them so he could lick the plates afterward.

    I don’t have a cat myself right now – the whole “no time for them” thing resonates; I barely have time to take care of myself some days (and lately, I have barely been able to keep it together enough to take care of myself). I would LIKE to have a cat; I like cats. But right now it doesn’t feel fair to one to have one…Report