One day coming home from daycare my mom gave me a cardboard box to hold. Inside was a solid grey kitten they had found in the mcdonalds dumpster behind her workplace. He had only come out for my mom, so she took it as a sign to take him home. We named him Whiskers and he was the sweetest boy for a few years, until he ran away after another cat through a hole in the screen.
Then my dad took me to “look at kittens” and we know how that goes. The family had named her vanzoelen (for my dad) and so we named her Zoe. She lived until the week before I graduated University, 19 beautiful years of life, she was basically my sibling growing up.
Then when I worked for the county, I got a text from my foreman. He said someone had dropped off a kitten and though he was fine with kittens, when it grew up into a cat he was going to take it out back and shoot it. This is the reality of country life. The rest of the litter had been dumped around the county and hadn’t been so lucky - my job partially roadkill cleanup after all. My partner at the time who lived in a frat house in London Ontario had been wanting a cat so we took her. Turns out she’s a boy, as most orange cats are.
He lived well at the frat house, becoming the happiest most social party cat, and then gained a ton of weight living with my exs mom, being pampered into full Garfield mode. He moved in with us and was very lonely while we worked shifts, so we started looking for a friend.
We went to the kitty cafe in downtown Guelph, but the kitten we wanted was taken. We bonded with a cute adult cat and said we would come back. Four months later we go back and the same adult cat comes out to say hi. We asked how she hadn’t been adopted yet as she was so cuddly and friendly, and the team said she had actually only come out for us, she hated the kittens and had been hiding so much no one ever got to see her. We immediately knew we had to rescue her. Her backstory was sad, she had been taken in sa a stray by an elderly lady who already had 6 cats and had been forced to downsize with a move. Her name was taffy then, and was changed to butterscotch when she was adopted to a family of adult children for their mom. Their mom had been suffering from MS and Butters, a lazy bed cat who loves to cuddle, was the perfect companion. Unfortunately the diagnosis was wrong, and after a struggle her owner passed from ALS. She was too much of a painful reminder for the family, so they returned her to the rescue. We changed her name to Butters. She is still the happiest queen of the house.
Frankly, her and Simba initially only seemed to tolerate each other, but they grew into friends over the years. Simba passed away at 10 years old from metastatic cancer in the fall of 2024. I am not a religious person and before losing Simba, I didn’t really believe there was much after death, but these days I’m happy to say he’s given me a little hope about that. I held off on getting another cat, partly because Butters seemed ok as the only cat of the house, and partly because I just knew that when the timing was right, Simba would send me a cat.
On the way home from Valens conservation area, my current partner and I spotted a tiny orange cat under a solitary streetlight, in the middle of the country in the middle of the night on Foreman road. At the time, we were pretty sure he was lost, but when I brought him into the car he quickly became distressed.
My partner convinced me that we may be stealing someones cat, that he had a bad feeling about taking him, and he was clearly not happy, so we left him. I cried nonstop and vowed to go back in the morning. Morning came and I went back out, not once but twice, cat food bag in hand. I spoke with all the neighbours of the area and no one knew of this orange cat, he wasn’t a resident cat and now I was certain he had been dumped.
After hours of searching, I saw a small cat emerge from the bushes along the side of the road. A white and tabby cow cat. Behind him, ever so shy, a orange baby hiding in the sticks. I spent a few minutes coaxing them into my lap and we became fast friends. They followed me back to the car and my partner gave me the ok to take them home. Turns out we were both right - I was right that the cat had been dumped and needed help, but if we had taken him that night, we would have separated him from his bonded brother. Now the two are inseparable, happy, spoiled, and tolerated (also loved) by the queen of the house Butters.
