If you’re a house cat, your human’s death is just about the worst thing that could happen to you.
Cats are often left to grieve on their own, without any consideration from surviving relatives who may not like animals or cats in particular.
Treated as an afterthought, with no one to comfort or reassure them, those scared cats then endure another trauma when they’re taken from their homes and placed in tiny shelter cages. Depressed and shocked, they’re easily overlooked in shelters.
That’s why it’s heartening to hear about a French woman who drove with her boyfriend from Paris to Cavaillon in southern France to adopt her late grandmother’s beloved cat, Felix. That’s a drive of 708 kilometers — or about 440 miles in the proper ‘Merican measurement of distance — and almost the length of the country.
Adding to the challenge was the fact that Felix had never travelled before, the woman — who posts as @felixthegoateecat — noted.
“My grandmother was the nicest person,” she wrote. “She always fed Felix because she was always afraid he was hungry.”
Felix
It’s pretty clear the late grandmother and Felix had a special bond, and her granddaughter understands that.
She wrote about the process of allowing him to adjust to his new people and surroundings, and documented milestones like the first time he made biscuits in his new home.
So far, it looks like Felix is settling in just fine in his new life as a city cat.
PJ is a shy cat, and her adopters were reminded that she would need time to adjust to her new home.
A family adopted a shy, anxious cat who has been waiting months for a forever home, then brought her back within 24 hours, explaining that they decided they wanted to “swap” her for a kitten.
I’ll pause for a second here to let PITB readers yell a few choice words about the family.
Okay, now that’s out of the way, hear me out: I think the cat, PJ, dodged a bullet.
The staff at the Melbourne, Australia shelter say they went above and beyond to screen for people who insisted they would be patient with the two-year-old Calico, made sure the adopters met her several times, and sent them home with a list of resources for dealing with a shy cat.
PJ Credit: AAPS Victoria
It sounds like they did a pretty thorough job, and the whole situation illustrates how difficult it is for people who run shelters to be sure they’re sending their animals to good homes.
But PJ wasn’t going to a good home. The kind of people who would return a cat after a day to “swap her for a kitten” are extremely unlikely to be good caretakers, and to treat PJ like the thinking, feeling feline she is.
PJ’s back at the shelter after her “forever home” didn’t work out.
I’ve seen cats like that, and they live miserable, bored, unloved lives. Once their novelty wears off or they’re no longer cute kittens, they become background noise, ignored as if they’re basically house plants. They have no way out of those situations, sadly, and no way to express their feelings, which is why it’s so important for us to learn to listen to our cats. But that’s a subject for a different post.
And no, the shelter did not honor the request to “swap” PJ with a kitten, as if the adopters were in Target, bringing back a 44 inch flat screen for a 50 inch 8K model.
Let’s hope a kind soul hears about PJ’s situation and has a home for her. If any of our Australian readers are interested, PJ’s with the Australian Animal Protection Society (AAPS) in Victoria, and you can find her adoption profile here.
A young ginger tabby made himself at home at the former Comiskey Park in Chicago, feasting off of ballpark food shared with him by fans.
The Chicago White Sox opened the baseball season on the road, then headed home where they hosted the San Francisco Giants — and a scrappy, hungry stray who helped himself to heaps of stadium food.
The cat appeared in the park for three consecutive nights of the homestand, emerging from a hiding spot in the bowels of the stadium to sidle up to fans eating ballpark grub and meow for them to share. And share they did, according to Block Club Chicago, with fans holding the little guy and feeding him “shredded chicken off the top of their ballpark nachos.”
“He was just super chill and very comfortable roaming the park, like it’s his territory,” White Sox fan Alexis Lopez told Block Club.
The stray, now named Beef, is enjoying his forever home and his doting human servant. Credit: Darren Georgia
The cat, who was “a little scruffy and thin” according to Lopez, took an overly enthusiastic bite of some stadium food and accidentally punctured the skin on her cousin Antonia Denofrio’s finger. Stadium staff treated Denofrio at the park and thought they were in for a thorough search for the kitty, but the night after the White Sox finished their home series against the Giants, the orange tabby “jumped right up onto a security golf cart and was super friendly,” White Sox team photographer Darren Georgia said.
Georgia brought the cat home, got him fixed and examined by a vet and named him Beef. Now they’re best buds.
“He’s outgoing, loves to play and snuggle,” Georgia told The Block. “Just everything you’d hope for in a cat.”
The unicorn of cats
When Alli Magish, a foster for NoCo Kitties in Colorado, took home a mom cat and her five kittens, she realized one of them was incredibly rare: a male calico.
Charlie the male calico kitten is now 11 weeks old. Credit: NoCo Kitties
Magish brought the little guy, now named Charlie, to two veterinarians to confirm, and for all of them Charlie is their first male calico. Only about one in 3,000 calicos are male, the Coloradoan reported, citing statistics from the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine.
“We will probably get huge adoption fee offers for him, but we want him to go to the best home, and that’s not necessarily the one that could be the highest bidder,” Davida Dupont, founder of NoCo Kitties, told the Coloradoan.
Typical adoption fees for kittens at the rescue are $195, but Dupont says she wants to organize a fundraiser around the little guy before settling on the best place for his forever home. (Shhhh, no one tell Chloe Mitchell.) Since she spoke to the Coloradoan on April 1, NoCo Kitties has received a flood of adoption applications, and in a follow-up Facebook post Dupont says she hopes some of them will consider adopting the many other lovable cats at NoCo who are looking for homes.
After a TikToker raged about an adoption fee for a cat who had medical issues, her army of followers began harassing the shelter and its staff.
I don’t advocate criminality, but if some enterprising, preternaturally skilled hacker were to go Tyler Durden on TikTok and not just disable it for a few hours with a DDoS attack, but nuke it to oblivion by taking down its servers, backups and back-end code, that hacker would be a hero.
Songs would be written for this legend of a human being, performed to raucous applause by bards in taverns. A reincarnated Abraham Lincoln would lead a parade of patriots to the White House to wrap the benevolent hacker in the American flag and present the presidential Medal of Freedom. A bald eagle would alight on a Rose Garden cherry tree, raising a wing in salute to our hero, and fireworks would inaugurate a new federal holiday in honor of the glorious deed and its magnificent author.
But that’s not going to happen, so I have to type the words “TikTok influencer” and try not to gag as I relate the story of one Chloe Mitchell, a Michigan college student who sicced her army of three million followers on a non-profit, no-kill animal shelter.
Mitchell is one of those people who makes you wish life had mute buttons. She tells her side of the story with theatric facial expressions, frequently screaming — literally screaming — into the camera as she claims she fell in love with a cat at Michigan’s Noah Project and didn’t balk at the $900 adoption fee.
She says she’s happy with her cat, Puka, and loves her. But she still has adopter’s remorse.
“I spent $900 on a fuzzy scratch ball that’s going to puke all over my furniture,” she says at one point in a video she made after the adoption.
She bemoans the adoption fee, saying the cat costs “two thirds of a Yorkie” and a quarter the price of a new Louis Vuitton bag.
“Why isn’t there a price tag on her cage?” Mitchell screams. “Why can’t she be a $25 cat? … That’s life changing money, $900. I could just not eat.”
Mitchell’s followers, who called the shelter operators “scammers” and said they “played” Mitchell, among less charitable comments, have been targeting the shelter online and by phone, making “profanity-laced calls,” according to MLive.
Mitchell says the shelter told her the adoption fee was so high because Puka is an F5 Savannah, a fifth-generation hybrid of a domestic cat and an African serval. In her video she admits she doesn’t know what a Savannah is and confuses a tabby coat pattern for a breed.
But Mashele Garrett-Arndt, Noah Project’s director, told MLive the adoption fee reflected the substantial costs the shelter incurred by rescuing Puka, her litter mates and kittens from the other litters she came with, who had multiple medical issues. The shelter paid for veterinary surgery, including procedures for one cat who had two legs amputated, as well as shots, microchips, spaying/neutering, and special diets for the ailing kitties.
Puka, originally named Heart by the shelter. Credit: Noah Project
The Noah Project took in the young cats and their mothers from a woman who purchased the momma cats from a breeder. The mother cats went into heat again, predictably, and the problem multiplied litter by litter until the woman realized it was out of her ability to control and passed the problem along to the shelter.
The Noah Project took the mother cats and kittens, like any good rescue would, but an intake like that would stretch the resources of most shelters, let alone a small local operation. (See the appeals for assistance when larger organizations like the SPCA take in cats from hoarding situations, for example.) That this happened on the cusp of kitten season makes it even more difficult.
Since adopting Puka — and making a video in which she goes back and forth between saying she already adopted her and claiming she was thinking of adopting her — Mitchell has made at least half a dozen additional monetized videos about “the $900 cat,” including one in which she introduced her parents to their “$900 grandfurchild” and another in which she seemingly pretends to be on the phone with someone from the shelter, lecturing them about “taking advantage” of people and “profiting” off them. In the video, she does not pause long enough for the alleged person on the other end to speak.
“I’m so mad about this because she’s not only lying about this story but she’s making a profit off this,” Garret-Arndt said. “These cats came from an older woman in her 80s who bought these cats and overbred and couldn’t handle the situation. They all had medical issues and that’s the reason they were $900.”
Garret-Arndt told MLive her books are open for Mitchell and anyone else to inspect. In addition, the IRS 990 forms of non-profits are available via sites like Guidestar, allowing donors to check information like percentage of revenue spent on programs, meaning the amount that goes to the charitable cause after overhead.
Mitchell’s series of videos on her “$900 cat” saga had amassed almost 30 million combined views as of March 24
Mitchell isn’t hurting for cash despite her claim that she might have to go without eating after adopting her “$900 cat.” As a college volleyball player, she’s known as the first NCAA athlete to profit financially from NIL (name and image likeness), co-founded a company for other athletes looking to capitalize on NIL, and says she paid for Puka with money she made from the TikTok Creator’s Fund. In addition, she’s bragged about her many sponsorships.
An earlier story about Mitchell’s earnings said that in addition to the money she earns directly from the NCAA NIL deal, “five-figure deals are her baseline” for sponsorships.
Mitchell earns up to $20,000 per sponsored post, the story notes — and that was in 2021, when her follower count wasn’t as high. That’s an extraordinary amount of money for anyone, let alone a college kid, and doesn’t match up with her video pleading poverty over an adoption fee.
With 3 million followers, Mitchell could earn as much as $15,000 a month directly from TikTok alone, not including the lucrative sponsorships. Her initial post about the saga of her “$900 cat” registered almost six million views, some 28,000 comments and more than 660,000 likes. In all, her series of videos on the cat saga have amassed almost 30 million views. Most creators can only dream of those engagement numbers and the revenue associated with them.
In other words, Mitchell is not the typical college student working a part-time job in between classes and eating Ramen noodles to stretch her budget, and it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say she’s punching down by picking a fight with a small local rescue.
“I feel like she (Mitchell) got that cat as a stunt for her followers,” Garret-Arndt said. “She specifically asked for that cat. We were told she was an African Savannah cat but we don’t know.”
To her credit, Mitchell does seem taken with Puka, and we hope she cherishes the beautiful kitten regardless of whether she’s got serval lineage or is just a “basic” cat. Every cat is worthy of love and deserves a good home, and it appears Mitchell is doting on Puka, buying her lots of toys and cat furniture and cuddling with her.
Take it from me, loyal servant to a “basic” no-breed kitty: what’s important is the bond you form and the memories you make together, not the rarity of the breed. I wouldn’t part with Bud for $900,000, let alone $900.
In the meantime, the Noah Project continues to take abuse from the “influencer’s” followers, “swearing at us and calling us a horrible organization,” Garret-Arndt said.
“We don’t scam people,” she told MLive. “If they want to see my books and what I paid for medical, they can.”
She said the Noah Project is a small organization that focuses on making sure cats go to good homes instead of ending up in kill shelters where they’re likely to be euthanized.
“All of our animals leave here fixed and with all of their shots and preventatives, as well as being microchipped,” she wrote in a Facebook post in response to the manufactured controversy. “This all-costs money. No one is making a profit here, everything goes back into the shelter for medical supplies, food, etc.”
Mitchell says she’s ordered a DNA test for Puka and plans to do a reveal on TikTok, providing more material for more monetized videos in her ongoing saga of “the $900 cat.” She says she’ll “defend” the shelter to her followers if the DNA test does reveal serval lineage, but the damage has already been done, and we can’t help but wonder if she’ll be willing to offer a meal culpa after quadrupling down on claims that the shelter ripped her off.
More people are abandoning their pets, saying they can no longer afford to care for and feed them amid historic inflation.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ve experienced sticker shock in the last six or seven months, especially in grocery stores.
Staples like milk and bread cost two or three times what they did pre-inflation, some retailers are taking the opportunity to arbitrarily hike prices even higher, and a perfect storm of economic uncertainty and a rampaging bird flu caused the price of eggs and poultry to skyrocket.
By late 2022, almost 50 million chickens and turkeys had been killed by avian flu or culled because of it, and almost 10 million more were lost to the virus in the first 12 weeks of 2023, according to the CDC. That breaks the record for most birds lost to avian flu, which was set in 2015 when 51 million died or were culled.
Pet food prices are up too, mirroring grocery inflation, as are veterinary costs and medicine for cats and dogs.
Inflation has squeezed so many people that shelters in the US and UK are reporting unprecedented surrenders from people who believe they can’t afford their pets anymore. In some areas it’s so bad that local shelters have waiting lists — or surrender queues, as they’re called in the UK — for people parting with their pets.
“We get between 10 and 12 surrenders per week, so we’re looking at anywhere between 30 and 50 a month,” Ashley Burling of Montana-based Help For Homeless Pets said. “When you’re talking about inflation, you’re talking about vet bills, pet food, pet supplies and pet rent. I think inflation, I think people going back to work after the pandemic, there’s other reasons that they’re surrendered.”
More than 70 percent of adoptable pets at the Nevada SPCA previous had homes, executive director Lori Heeren told the local NBC affiliate. Her organization is on pace for 2,500 surrenders in 2023.
News outlets tell the same story in local markets across the country, and the Humane Society is seeing the same trend nationally, CEO Kitty Block told CNN. While pet-related costs increased sharply in 2022 — with food and supplies increasing by as much as 30 percent, according to NielsenIQ — statistics show they haven’t relented yet this year. In fact, prices are still edging up, albeit at a slower rate than the previous year.
To cope, more people are leaning on pet food pantries. In Iowa, for example, the Animal Rescue League gave away more than 40,000 pounds of pet food in 2020 and 2021, and a whopping 146,000 pounds in 2022.
Shelter operators say they want people to know there are options so they don’t feel they have to part with cats and dogs who have become family.
“This is bigger than dogs or cats in shelters,” Block said. “It’s about the people who love them.”
PITB readers are the kind of people who dote on their cats and most of us couldn’t imagine abandoning them even in hard times, but chances are we all know someone who’s thought about parting with their fluffy overlords.
They don’t have to give their beloved cats and dogs up. There are resources to help them meet their animal’s needs to prevent them from surrendering:
– Many local chapters of the Humane Society and SPCA, as well as private shelters, offer free spay/neuter clinics and free or low-cost veterinary exams. A guide from the Humane Society notes PetFinder allows users to search for pet-specific food pantries and low cost veterinary services
– There are programs that provide pet food to people who can no longer afford it
– Some shelters will place pets in temporary foster homes to help relieve the burden until their owners can take them back
– Buying food and medicine online is significantly cheaper than in grocery stores. Some offer deep discounts on meds to existing customers and prices from online retailers have remained relatively stable, especially when buying in quantity
– Social services programs may include provisions for pets
It’s in the best interests of shelters and animal welfare programs for cats and dogs to stay with their people, and not only because they don’t have the resources to house hundreds of abandoned pets on top of their usual intake.
Keeping people and pets together benefits both. Cats and dogs obviously don’t understand that their people are tearfully, reluctantly giving them up. All they know is they’ve been abandoned by the people who made them feel safe and loved. For the mental health and overall well-being of humans and their furry companions, they should stay together.
For some people, like Patricia Kelvin of Poland, Ohio, that means scrounging up whatever she can and cutting back on her own expenses before she will allow her cat to go without.
“There’s just no question in my mind. If my diet was going to be more beans than something else, I wouldn’t hesitate,” Kelvin told CNN. “If I had to sell my sterling silver, which I’ve had for 60 years, that would go before my little ‘Whiskers’ would be deprived.”
Pain In The Bud 