Zach Leaves Me Today

Mr. Wonderful has been adopted.

I suppose I'm in mourning. I'll get over it. Zach is leaving for his new home today.

Finally!! I get an adoption! It's a good home, nice people. They have other cats but he too will go into mourning, missing his friends and life here. It's hard on adult cats to go to new homes.

I think about the people handing over their treasured cats to strangers on craigslist day in and day out and ache for those cats, their lives completely disrupted and shaken apart. Their new home may be shit, full of drug and alcohol people, anger, a home where they are now barely noticed and neglected. Hopefully, some of the homes are absolutely wonderful, however, maybe far better than where they've lived so far.

Students are leaving now and trying to unload the pets they adopted or grabbed off craigslist in their short years in the area.

I remember two such cats in south town Corvallis. A woman asked me to clean her new place before she moved in. There were cat toys under and behind the stove. Two female students had lived there. When they left, they shoved out both their cats onto the street--a black male and an orange male.

The cats got into trouble immediately before neighbors realized they'd been abandoned. Two neighbors fed one and finally found the other, skinny and very ill, and he was euthanized. The second male was taken to Heartland too. The neighbors said the two shithead girls dumped all the cats things into the dumpster, like cat beds and litter box, when they left. They dumped the cats like trash, too.

You wonder how girls get so heartless and self-centered at such a young age. They must admire themselves in the mirror too much.

Zach is loved here. By me and all the other cats. We're all going to be thrown into chaos, with his absence. How will we make it without this kind hearted funny big guy who for just over a year now, has filled our hearts with laughter and love?

How will the Quirkies survive without Zach? Starry loves him, too. Everybody loves Zach. I love him.

I think about all the cats who have left me in the last months. Zuli and the four kittens I took from that Lebanon hell hole are all gone now. Zule and three of the kittens went to homes, while Forest died. Shaggy and Dickens are gone. Shaggy, one of Sage's four boys, abandoned in Lebanon, went to a Corvallis home, while Dickens, one of his brothers, went to another adoption rescue. Simba, another brother, died, of a heart problem compounded by a cold. Smolder, the fourth brother, and Sage, their mother, they're still here.

Brighty, from the Albany apartment complex, the little calico, is gone now, adopted out by another rescue, as is Willow, whom I trapped in my backyard in the middle of a stormy night.

Sure, I still have lots of cats still here waiting for homes. There's a never ending supply of cats and kittens in trouble out there, who need help. Craigslist is already full of free kittens. That article about overpopulation that was in the paper a few weeks ago, while incomplete, did mention the fact adoptions at shelters and rescues go way down in the summer, because of the massive numbers of free kittens offered up by irresponsible breeding freaks all over the place.

If a person lets their cat breed kittens, that person kills other cats. It's as simple as that.