Homeless Cats Need Our Help
And then I met her in person the following week. She was so personable and sweet and loving that I was totally smitten, and I promised her I’d take her home as soon as it could be arranged!
Melissa had been living at the shelter for the past year and a half, waiting for a “furever home”. She’d been rescued last year, when she was just a kitten. Melissa, along with her 3 littermates, her mother and another adult cat had all been simply abandoned in a Woodstock apartment when the tenants left.
The Victoria County SPCA took them all in. Over the following months, Melissa’s littermates were all adopted, but she was always left behind.
Last Saturday I went back to the shelter and brought Melissa home with me. After the SPCA rescued her when she was just a baby, except for vet visits she had never been anywhere but the shelter.
She howled a bit in her crate in the car on the ride home but seemed quite cool and collected once we arrived at Chez Stephanie. She was perfectly polite when she met Boswell the dog, then she went exploring…..and then she proceeded to utterly and completely disappear.
After 45 minutes or so, I began looking for her. My house isn’t really that big so I figured I’d find her easily….but I was wrong. The longer I looked and called, the more concerned I became. What if she’d found some hitherto unknown hole in my foundation, maybe something left by the flood, and got out of the house….I’d never find her. She’s never been outdoors!
There’s an old hole in the wall behind a bookcase, leftover from some electrical work….could she have actually gotten up inside that? It’s not that big, but her vanishing act was so total maybe she had managed to wriggle up inside that wall….
I crawled around looking under shelves in the basement, under the bed, and under dressers. I looked behind books on the shelves. I looked up on the tops of shelves, behind furniture and in every single place I could think of.
After 3 hours of this my mouth was actually dry with anxiety. And then….I heard a tiny little mewl as I was standing near the door to the kitchen. I couldn’t zero in on where the sound was coming from…. But Melissa was obviously still in the house. I kept calling her to try to get her to squeak again and finally, at long last, zeroed in on her location…she was in the freaking stove!
I pulled out the pan drawer under the oven and there she was, crouched on a cookie sheet. I’d looked behind the stove several times, but had completely forgotten that the back of the stove is open.
She likes to hang out on my desk to help me write and to curl up in my lap for snuggles. Melissa has turned out to be an absolutely delightful addition to my family.
I’m happy to be able to give Melissa a home, but there are thousands more cats in just Victoria and Carleton counties alone who desperately need homes. The Victoria County SPCA cannot accept any more cats at present…the shelter simply has run out of room. If the cats at the shelter are adopted or even fostered, the SPCA will be able to help more cats as winter approaches.
And, appalling as it is that Melissa was abandoned in an apartment, she was lucky. Someone found her and the SPCA was able to take her and her family in.
Many cats are simply dumped by the side of the road, left at gravel pits, abandoned near farms or thrown from cars. Shelter workers find boxes of kitten left at their doors on a regular basis. There are always notices hanging at our local grocery stores offering free kittens.
How many people do you know who have let their cat have kittens so that their kids “can witness the miracle of birth”?
Judging by the numbers, cat are more popular than dogs….homes with cats outnumber dog households in both Canada and the US, but for some reason cats do not yet have the same rescue support system that dogs do. Cats are simply disposable to far too many people….rather than being responsible pet owners and spaying or neutering their cats, they let them breed… leaving the cat overpopulation problem for others to deal with.
There are so many cats, and they breed so prolifically, that people have come to think of them as disposable and replaceable….I bet the people who left Melissa and her kin behind in that apartment got new cats when they got to wherever they were going to.
One un-spayed female cat, producing two litters per year, with 2.8 surviving kittens per litter, can add up to 11,606,077 cats in nine years. Think about those numbers…and think about how many un-spayed and non-neutered cats we have in New Brunswick and you can see that somehow, some way, we need to step up and help our cats to stop this population explosion.
Many people seem to think that cats can take care of themselves, that they can hunt and provide for themselves…but this is not true. Domestic cats need us in order to survive and live decent lives.
DunRoamin’ Animal Rescue has had a financial subsidy program available for folks in Carleton County who cannot afford the full price of spaying or neutering their cats. This program will soon be available to residents in areas of Victoria County as well.
Spaying and neutering is the only solution to reducing our homeless cat population. To inquire about the spay/neuter program please contact DunRoamin’ at 328-3380 or go online to DunRoamin’ for more information.
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
Gandhi
