Nothing has brought more joy to my girls than adopting these two orange tabby rescues. The kids had been feeling down and out about not having any real pets, so I decided to start looking into getting a cat again. Unfortunately, due to Covid quarantine, the few animal shelters left in our area were closed to visitors. I contacted a few people on Facebook who were operating animal rescues out of their homes, but they put off some bizarre vibes when interviewing me for the position of pet ownership. Finally, one day a local vet tech posted on our town group on Facebook that she had a lot of cats at her work that were about to be euthanized after being pulled from a bad hoarder house. These were some sick and underweight kitties. The vet tech didn’t have the heart to put them all down so she brought them home to her farm and posted looking for new homes.
I jumped on the chance to meet all these sweet fuzzballs getting a second chance at life.
I picked out a timid, scrawny little guy. Then I found out his papa wasn’t chosen by anyone, so I decided to bring Big Papa home as well. So now we have father and son, whom we named Hank and Larry.
These guys were not socialized at all. In fact they were mostly traumatized after a terrible life, then being taken to the animal hospital, sitting on death row, then instead getting neutered at the last minute and taken to get another strange building. These underweight, terrified cats were going to take a long time to warm up to us.
I knew getting them healthy and socialized would require some effort and strategy.
5 Pronged Approach to Socializing and Emotionally Healing Our Rescue Cats
Our kitties are now thriving after a bad early life experience. We approached their care with the following:
-An enclosed and controlled space. Don’t overwhelm.
-Exposure to people
-Relaxation
-Play
-Consistency
For the first two weeks, I set them up in our downstairs family room with a closed door. They had food, water, litter box, and comfort. This is the room we all hang out in so I thought they could get used to us a few hours each day. They just hid under the couch all day and night. This wasn’t going to work.
I decided to task my eight year old with the job of loving the fear out of the kitties. She was up for the task. I moved all the cat items to our girl bedroom. It is a large bedroom with its own bathroom. I had them keep their door closed to keep the cat’s new environment a closed unit. This room was really ideal since the windows next to the beds have a nice view of our farm and chicken run. The cats immediately began hanging out up on the beds instead of beneath like cave dwellers.
My daughter began playing with them for hours every day. She played string games, fetch, and forced lots of snuggling upon them within two days, they began sleeping on top of her in her bed at night. Suddenly they began to actually eat. And eat. And eat. Several months later, these animals still eat like it’s the first food they’ve seen in a year.
The other kids spent enough time in the room to get the kitties used to them, but those felines were definitely bonded to my eight year old. At one point she was so serious about her job to socialize them that she didn’t come out of her room for anything other than food for about five days.
It has now been about three months and they are like different animals. They have gained enough weight that I would say they are at ideal. Their fur looks completely different. They have such nice fluffy coats now. They actually come out from under furniture and hover around your feet. They still run away if I get too near too quickly, but they don’t hide anymore.
They finally began meowing. I never thought about why cats meow. It wasn’t to communicate with each other. It’s usually to communicate with a non-cat. Having cats be silent was so odd. Now they meow at me loudly, especially when hungry. They trust me enough to communicate!
We have left the door to the room open for a couple months now and they will cross the threshold and sit in the hallway next to the door. At this rate it might be a year before they truly start exploring the house. But hey, no rush. Perhaps they prefer that hallway. It is like a mouse run right there since the hall goes to a room where we store chicken feed. Those cats know what’s up.