A House for Cats and Kids

Every rescue has a story. Some are risky, tricky, funny, dramatic, traumatic or even cinematic, and they are all worth telling, because they are strongly connected to our work and reflect our engagement and philosophy. The cat Felix represents the painful rescue, at least for me!!

There is always a plastic house with some kibble and a blanket in our front garden, which is visited by feral cats or opossums at nights. By daylight we never noticed any movements until that September day three years ago, when I saw a black and white furball hiding under the car. I haven´t even noticed that the little house was permanently inhabited, but this stranger clearly had been using it as a shelter for some time! In order to give him the opportunity of being neutered and adopted, I fetched a cat cage and when I was sure that the cat was sleeping innocently in his house, I prepared a challenging move from one cage to the other. Though I knew that a panicking cat can quickly turn into an attacking panther, there was no time to hesitate. It had to be done. A scared thunderball came out and instead of jumping directly into the safer cage, he tried to escape and the attempt to rescue him, would have been in vain. So I grabbed him, just like the mother cats hold their newborn kittens. But this one was no newborn kitten and I understood he would fight this out desperately. And he did. He scratched my arm and he bit my hand, until I finally could throw him into the cat cage and the wrestling match was over. The next day we headed to the vet´s in order to get him neutered and found  out that the fierce fighter still had some surprise for me: he was already fixed and he wore a collar with his name and a phone number. What a lucky Felix!! How brave and determined he was!!! I immediatedly called his family who almost did not belief that their beloved pet who had been missed for four months, has been found 50 km from his home. After the vet cleaned a deep wound caused by the collar that had slipped under one of his arms, the family was happily reunited. For me the story ended in a hospital bed, with a swollen hand and some badly infected bite and scratch wounds. The moral of the story: if you want to rescue a cat, be prepared!! … and use some leather gloves.