This is our first foster cat, Nan, or Narnia as she was known on her adoption forms. Among the details you might be able to pick out from the photo is that she only has one eye. And half a tail. And some cigarette burns. You might even be able to see where she was set on fire. And yet those facts weren't the most heartbreaking thing about Nan. What really broke your heart about Nan was that she still loved people.
She was dumped outside a supermarket in North London and taken to a vet, who treated her and passed her on to Cats Protection. He guessed from her injuries that she'd been kicked repeatedly before she was burned and he suggested that she probably wouldn’t live. In the same week, the Cats Protection League had carried out a homecheck on us as prospective cat fosterers (more about this later) and decided that a seriously abused cat with an uncertain life expectancy was the perfect test to make sure we were truly serious about this fostering lark.
I picked Nan up from the vet having been warned about what had been done to her, and I was extremely nervous. From the description of her injuries I was expecting her to be 9/10ths scar tissue and deeply angry or scared; a cat that would be hard to look at and difficult to love. All cat behaviourists suggest that you keep new cats in one room at first, so I lined the sitting room with blankets, prepped it with food bowls and litter trays, opened the top of the cat box and retreated across the room to see what spitting troll would emerge. Instead, Nan popped her head up like a jack-in-the box, made a little chirping noise, and after a quick sniff around the room she was on my lap, kneading like a kitten and purring like a tractor.
No comments:
Post a Comment