Hope Goes Home

Hope just left. I am torn as usual over her leaving, for a home near Bend. The couple, retired, have been waiting to adopt her for two weeks, prevented from coming to get her by the heavy snows in the mountain passes until today. She will be an inside only cat. They are diehard cat lovers. When their last cat passed away, of cancer, at an old age, they began searching for another cat on petfinder. They found Hope's story and from then on, it had to be Hope they adopted. I was delighted, of course, and am very happy she has got a great home now.

Here are three photos of Hope. The first was taken in January. The next two were taken the day I rescued her, after her horrific injury.
Hope, photo taken in January.
Hope, just after she came out of the rental foundation and I put her in a live trap, with her badly injured eye.
Photo of Hope with her kittens around her, that I took through the window of the rental, before she brought her kittens out to me.

We'll miss her here. Especially Brambles and Mooki, the teen boys, with whom she wildly played and slept. Hope loved playing in an empty paper sack and daringly flying after a feather toy on a stick, that I made. This behavior impressed the teen boys immensely. They idolized her. Her solitary eye intrigued them also.

I sent her off with her beloved homemade feather toy and well wishes.

Hope is the cat whom I rescued from an empty dilapidated downtown Albany rental house. She had retreated inside it, with her three kittens, Teddy, Jiggles and Scruffy, after sustaining a blunt force injury to her head that knocked one eye from its socket.

I tapped on the window of the empty house. She was inside, with her kittens around her. She saw me through the window and began meowing pitiously. You see, she trusted me. I had gotten her spayed a few weeks before. She didn't know who else she could really trust. So I believe she waited hoping I would come save her.

A Corvallis woman had showed up, to help. I didn't even know her. Because we could not get into the house and I really didn't want to break in, knowing I'd then be arrested, she went off to try to get the police to come, and failing that, a reporter from the Democrat Herald. Neither the police nor the DH would come, however. So it was up to me to get her out.

The house was locked up. I went around to the hole in the foundation. The cats would enter through the hole then go up into the house through the broken out floor. The tenant, a man named Ralph, who allegedly abandoned her, had lived in this house.

I called into the house from that hole. To my surprise, first, out came the kittens, one by one. Then here came Hope. She'd ordered her kittens out to me. She wanted them safe, too. I took them with me. A Corvallis woman who had showed up, unannounced, took Hope and offered to pay for her care and find her a home.

She found her a fosterer, but never a home, and the woman promised the fosterer to have her out and into a home by September. I didn't know what had happened, and thought she'd found Hope a home. She did not return e-mails or phone calls. But apparently the fosterer never really heard from the Corvallis woman again either. She finally found a very nice man, in late November, who took Hope home briefly with him. But she didn't integrate with his one other cat.

In the meantime, I finally found out what had gone on. I wasn't happy with that Corvallis woman, since I knew I could have found Hope a home quickly. So she'd already been passed around some, although the fosterer and the man who briefly took her in, are wonderful people. An abused cat does not need more insecurity, however.

In early January, Hope returned to me. I posted her on petfinder and got an immediate response from someone in Corvallis. They thought better of it, however, and decided against a third cat. Ten day or less later, I got another inquiry about Hope, from this couple. They became snowbound, however, but have been calling every few days to assure me they want her. Today they came and Hope went home.

I love Hope. I cannot believe how cruel people can be to a little kitty, trying to raise her kittens after being kicked out into a flea ridden disgusting yard by some guy, named Ralph, who took her in probably on a whim then moved and left her like a used condom.

I don't know who hit her, but I have deep suspicions of who did. The Albany police would not get involved. The Albany paper refused to do a story on her. I then tried to get the Corvallis paper to do a story on her, to help defray costs by getting donations, but they said they wouldn't either, because it had happened in Albany, and that was Democrat Herald turf. In fact, it truely was DH turf. She was suffering only three blocks from the DH's offices.

There was no justice for what she endured, but there were arms reaching out from all sides to provide her love and refuge---from the Corvallis woman, who at least took her in for vet care, to the fosterer in Corvallis, a college student, to that kind man who tried to give her a home. There was the neighbor woman in downtown Albany, who was feeding her and who called me when she was hurt. And there was me, Miss Empathy, who saw a brave abused soul like Hope and could not imagine not intervening.