I love Oscar! Underneath that handsome black tie and tails tuxedo exterior is one of the sweetest and well mannered gentlemen one could ever hope to meet!
Mind you, visitors only get to admire the back end of his sweet self as he disappears down to my bedroom. After everything that Oscar has been through. it would seem he is all out of trust for anyone but me:(
Oscar was in terrible shape when he showed up here three years ago. He was terribly thin and it was obvious he had come out on the losing end of more than one battle :( To make matters worse, all this was happening at the hardest and coldest part of what was a particularly rough winter.
Originally, I had thought he might have been Dora's mother, but by the time the above picture was taken we had already been to the vets and discovered that 'Bridget' was actually Auntie Oscar! And before the keyboards catch on fire, that actually made his tale sorrier still to discover that at some point someone had cared enough to have him neutered :(
But I am wandering afield as I often do in my meandering way. After years of reporting a cat colony to PET Projects, finally someone called who was willing to be part of the solution. (The subject of how highly I hold PET Projects skill at partnering with their community is a timely topic that has been, and will be again, deserving of a post of its own :)
PET Projects had been told that, while there were originally fourteen cats, that the people feeding the colony thought the numbers were down to four or five. When they went to investigate for themselves, they only found five fairly friendly cats, shivering in the cold.
Like the rest of the rescue world, at PET Projects most miracles are made on a shoestring. Funds were down, but it was believed that five would be easily manageable.
One of their volunteers is such a skillful trapper that he has been nicknamed Trapper John. Skillful indeed! Within a day he had ten cats! By the next day the numbers were up to seventeen! As of last count, twenty one cats have been rescued from the old abandoned house!
How did they get there? What do you think?!? Oscar did not wake up one frigid February morning and decide to pack his bags and leave! Neither did these poor little kitties!
Like Oscar was, many of them are in terrible shape! It is the worst sort of deliberate blindness and cruelty to imagine for one minute that house pets will manage well when left to fend for themselves!
Out here in the country, we have seen them struck down on the roadside and found frequent evidence of violent and painful Unhappy Encounters with predators! For every Oscar who eventually finds safe harbour there are ever so many more that suffer terribly for the short time that they survive!
What can you do? Besides hug your own pets and keep them for life? Right here, right now, PET Projects is facing a staggering vet bill! If you want to help with that, please click here.
In the long term, if you personally see a cat being abandoned, please do not look the other way and think that it is not your problem. Take down a license plate number or pass on the names of tenants who have left pets to the cruelty line!
We might not have laws with enough teeth to prevent people from chaining dogs ... YET ... but at this point in time is actually is illegal to abandon an animal, eh?
What time is it? When rescue groups like PET Projects are so often tasked with being 'clean up crew', it is always, always time to support that work!
“While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. ” Apple Computer Inc.
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