Rescue Story: Something About the Day
June has always been a big month for me to rescue or accept cats to foster, and for a myriad of reasons. It’s true that, by June, kittens are abundant to overflowing and need to be rescued and fostered, their mothers trapped and spayed and hopefully rehomed with their kittens or returned to a safe place to live with care. Just about every June for years I had a litter or two of kittens with or without their mother who I had found and caught myself or who someone surrendered to me. Some of the June kittens and sometimes mother cats I’ve written about here have been “Kittens in the Night/Getting to Know You” and I’m fairly certain “A Trick of Genetics, Tess and Her Boys” as well as a few others I haven’t written about, yet, at least.
Other times, knowing that shelters are often full by June because of the abundance of kittens and would be full through September at the earliest, I’ve accepted adult cats whose owners wanted to give them up rather than send them to the shelter during this busiest time. These have included cats who college students adopted who they couldn’t take home, and just as often they are cats with behavioral issues and something about the busyness of summer gives people less time and patience to deal with a cat who needs a little understanding or has a true medical issue that takes time and skill to resolve.
But cats need assistance through human major life changes that have nothing to do with the date but coincidentally happen in June, such as critical or chronic illness or death, or divorce or when people need to enter a shelter either for protection or housing, though these are often temporary.
Several of the cats who spent their lives with me, or a significant portion thereof, came to me in June, through most of these circumstances. Kublai came to me in June 1981 as a rescued four-week-old kitten from a farm that was overrun with kittens and the threat to drown them all, and Sally in June 1983 as a foster adult whose deafness made her a little too hard for her person to handle anymore. Allegro and his brother, who I later adopted out, came to me as fosters from a litter my sister and nieces had rescued born behind a building where my sister worked. And, of course, Peaches and her sister Cream came to me at the end of June in 2005 after their owner had died and a friend had waited as long as she could hoping for an adopter. Sadly, though not technically a rescue, Mr. Mistoffelees, The Forever Kitten also came into my life in June.
But for the past two years a certain date in June has been auspicious, enough that I even remember the date in relation to these things where otherwise I need to look them up. June 16 has brought me, directly or indirectly, four foster cats, and each of the stories has a cat or more of a different age, a different reason, and a different rescue. In 2013, June 16 was the day I picked up Lakota and Emeraude, the 20- and 19-year-old cats whose owner had no place to keep them. In 2014, Kennedy was found having seizures on a street in Kennedy Township, was picked up by Margo and Tarra and then came here to live his last six weeks. And also on that date in 2014, two dirty and emaciated black kittens ran out in front of a car and were captured by that driver and surrendered to the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society; one of those kittens was Smokie, now Basil, who, though he’d been fostered with his brother who was adopted, failed his temperament test when returned to the shelter and was held for assessment, bad news at the end of August, coming here on August 28.
This year, June 16 passed without incident. But time may tell us something more at a future date. Please enjoy all the rescue stories linked here.
Read more stories in my weekly Rescue Stories series
and read about my Rescue Stories series.
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sum ole familiar faces heer…..one in fact hangs on de wall ….oh a place called ….trout towne ♥♥♥♥
It’s good to see them again Tabbies.
It was so good to see Kennedy photo.
Hi, Annabelle! We’ll be having some anniversaries coming up soon too.