In the past, Teresa and I made a committment to adopting those cats who didn’t have a chance at the local shelter — the feral, the unfriendly, those who just didn’t like people — to be barn cats at our Almost Heaven Ranch. Caring for them wasn’t always easy, but we always took care of their medical needs and gave them the safest, happiest, most enriched lives possible.
Then one day, Teresa was at the local shelter dropping something off and heard about a kitten who had suffered a broken leg after his mother, a feral outdoor cat, was shot and killed by a so-called human.
She swept him up and took him to the vet (I was out of town), where they treated his injury and then added him to the litter of another hard-luck cat mom. This girl had been found with her kittens locked in the closet of an abandoned home, with a sofa pushed up against the closet door. I despair of the human race when I hear stories like this.
Once the babies were weaned, all but three had been adopted. We brought those three back to our home, where our son, Lex, adopted two of them and we decided to make the third, Tally, our first housecat.
Tally wasn’t originally going to be part of our family. We had planned on adopting the first little orange cat with the broken leg. But it was obvious that this sweet gray tabby was meant to be part of our family — and she’s now got not only Teresa and me, but our dogs QT Pi and Quixote, wrapped around her tiny paw, too! (We haven’t introduced her to our big dogs, and probably won’t. Gracie has disabilities that make it difficult for her to get around, and Quill’N had lived her life on a chain before we adopted her, and we honestly don’t trust her around a cat.)
In this video, she’s playing with a Jackson Galaxy toy we bought her, along with 2,397,121 other toys, beds, scratching posts, and other cat accessories she’ll hever have to live without!
Love you, Tally!
