“Unadoptable” — A Shelter Cat’s Story
“She’s unadoptable,” I remember the vet tech telling us.
Apparently, she’d been rejected by three homes.
My wife and I weren’t in the back of our local vet clinic to adopt the cat. Instead, we were there to save one of our own. Caladan (“Cally” for short) had gotten out several years ago during the height of tick season and come back two days later covered in them — they were even under his eyelids. Our vet did the best he could to remove all of them but in between the time that Cally ran out and when we got him treated we suspect one — likely several — of those ticks transmitted the various blood diseases that Cally began suffering from some time later.
Flash-forward several years and Cally was now extremely anemic — his poor little furry tomcat body just couldn’t make enough blood. In a last-ditch attempt, our seasoned vet thought a blood transfusion might buy Cally enough time to recover, and he asked the local animal shelter to send over a blood donor.
That cat was this cat, the “unadoptable” one that we were all looking at and that my wife and I were trying not to get attached to.
It didn’t work, not the least of which was because we both knew that the label “unadoptable” was likely a death sentence.
So, after Cally’s blood transfusion the next day, my wife and I went straight over to the animal shelter. It was a short distance from our vet clinic, and as we drove over there, I remembered a central lesson that I had learned in a negotiation class I had taken for my first Master’s: Always make an offer (at least in a business context).
So, my wife and I walked into the shelter and we told the receptionist right away that we were there to adopt the “unadoptable” cat — the one that had been sent over as the blood donor. The receptionist acted on our request right away, and we heard the shelter’s director tell one of the techs there to “go get Boots” (“Boots” was apparently their name for the cat).
With palpable relief on his face, the shelter’s director profusely thanked us. We suspected that we had saved him from having to direct, or perform, a very grim duty. As I recall, he didn’t even make us fill out the paperwork we had customarily done for our previous adoptions at the shelter, and “Boots” was quickly placed in a cardboard carrier.
As we left the shelter and placed “Boots” in our car, I heard a shelter worker in the parking lot remark to us:
“Don’t bring her back.”
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Back at our house, my wife and I introduced “Boots” to the rest of our cats and dogs. As experienced pet owners, we had done this several times and gotten mixed results depending on the individual animal. Some hid, others made friends right away. Boots, or “BuddhaCat” as she would soon be known, did a bit of both. She jumped out of her carrier and looked around in apparent bewilderment at finding herself in yet another home. My wife and I began petting her and giving her the extra TLC that we gave all of our “new” animals and she soon began to settle in.
Far from being “unadoptable”, we found her to actually be a rather sweet cat, and she was soon cuddling and loudly purring in my arms with unmistakable affection as I stroked her with the experience I had gladly earned from being around animals my whole life.
BuddhaCat generally got along with our other cats and dogs, which I thought largely belied the warnings and cautions we had gotten from the shelter. That’s not to say she didn’t growl or swipe at our other animals from time to time — “BuddhaCat”, to use a human psychological term, was an introvert. She seemed to prefer her own company and she soon had a spot picked out on our cat tree where she would spend the majority of her time sleeping and grooming herself and otherwise observing her new home. When our other animals would get too close to her for her taste, she would usually reproach them with a growl or hiss, which they, by and large, seemed to take in stride with the body language equivalent of “What-ever!”
Again, BuddhaCat was not the aggressive terror that my wife and I had been led to believe she was. What she really seemed to need was to be placed in a home where the humans really understood cats, which, luckily for BuddhaCat, was our home. In fact, cats had always been a part of my wife and I’s relationship. When I moved in with her “temporarily” (I’ll save that for another story :o) ) my wife already had two cats and on my first birthday that I spent with her, I asked for one of my own. Later, when we married and bought our house in the country we added to our brood, which soon included a young gray tomcat kitten named Caladan that would grow into the adult that would one day run out and lead us, by circumstance, to BuddhaCat.
And speaking of that name, the reason why “Boots” became “BuddhaCat” was because of my wife. I had wanted to name her “Clara”, after the heroic Civil War nurse and founder of The Red Cross. But my wife kept calling her “BuddhaCat” because of her fat belly and all-around roly-poly physique. Eventually, the name stuck, and when we came to register her name officially with a rabies vaccine and the vet’s office “BuddhaCat” became her official name.
Speaking of my wife, when BuddhaCat came down from her spot on the cat tree she often lounged on the end table that was situated to the left of my wife’s easy chair in our living room. There she could frequently be seen giving loving looks to my wife with what appeared to be sheer adulation. It was a feeling that my wife would frequently reciprocate by giving in and petting her.
On one such occasion my wife snapped the following photograph of BuddhaCat giving one of her signature, loving looks:
I think this photo sums up BuddhaCat perfectly, as well as hinting at the Cinderella-like nature of her story. Far from being unadoptable, I suspect that she just needed to be understood. Cats can be very honest creatures, and they don’t tend to hold back when they’re upset, or, when, they’re happy. But they don’t socialize and communicate quite like humans, or, for that matter, dogs, who have endeared themselves so much to humans in part because they are like humans so much socially. Not that cats aren’t social — on the contrary, as I and many other cat “friends” have observed they can be and are very social, as well as possessing their own individual personalities and even voices. But cats are different enough that it can be off-putting to some people, and individual cats can be seen as aloof, difficult, and, as was the case with BuddhaCat, even unadoptable.
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The blood transfusion didn’t work.
Despite our, and our vet’s best efforts, Cally passed away two weeks later. However, in our shared grief, my wife and I took comfort in knowing that at least one life had been saved — BuddhaCat’s.
BuddhaCat herself would go on to live eight more years with us, eight years that she likely wouldn’t have had if my wife and I had not stepped in. When she heard her call to cross over the Rainbow Bridge, she joined Cally, Pekoe, Tau, Jinx, Grover, Gremlin, Revlon, and all the other animals that you, I, and my wife, have ever loved. Far from being unadoptable, BuddhaCat just needed patience, love, empathy, and understanding — traits that We could all benefit from experiencing more of.
Rest In Peace, Sweetheart.
