Rescue Me: How to Save a Cat

“This is a really bad plan.”

“Yes, it is.”

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More About

• The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
• Jeff Blodgett
• Audrey Hepburn
• Animal Rights
• Pets

With zero hour approaching, Soy still hadn’t found a home. “Any luck?” Sharon asked, the evening before her flight. “The Humane Society closes at 6 ... I feel so bad.”

For half an hour, she sat in her car in the parking lot of the Pasadena Humane Society, holding Soy and crying.

Why don’t I just take her? you’re thinking. There is an unspoken equation that defines the precise point at which a girl becomes a crazy cat lady. Your level of insanity rises in direct proportion to the number of cats living in your house multiplied by the ratio of house square-footage to weight of cat in pounds. I have two cats in a two-bedroom condo. You do the math.

Ultimately, however, the value of one small mammal’s life outweighed my vanity. I folded. Soy came to stay. Sharon left for New York, sad but grateful.

The Big Apple was a good move for Sharon: “As I passed by the rows of brownstones with pull-down stairs, I had a big smile on my face as I was envisioning Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” she wrote. “Called in for Chinese takeout last night ... felt very Miranda from Sex and the City.”

In the meantime, some serious cat-on-cat violence was happening at my condo. Lots of claws skidding on wood floors. Lots of hissing and puffed-up tails. The litter box became contested territory, the cat version of the Gaza Strip. Soy would have to go.

“Set her back out into the food chain, is what I say,” someone jokingly suggested. Isn’t that what nature is like? Kill or be killed?

The term “no kill” as applied to animal shelters is fraught with controversy. The term is ill-defined, for one, mainly because there are no across-the-board standards, governmental or otherwise. It’s a myth that you can drop a pet off at any old shelter and the folks who run it will care for it, love it, treat it humanely until kind, decent owners can be procured.

Same goes for rescue groups (a.k.a. networks of individuals who don’t necessarily have a physical shelter location, but try to find homes for pets anyway). There are good ones and bad ones. Some of the private shelters who say they are “no kill” keep animals in deplorable, overcrowded conditions, complacently housing them for years, with little effort to find them homes.

As for the government-run places, Los Angeles County and city shelters are bound by law to house healthy animals for a minimum of five days, after which they can be killed if new owners aren’t found. Sick or “unadoptable” animals — a judgment call, certainly — can be euthanized on the spot.

Moreover, people who want to adopt do not go through extensive background checks. There should be plenty of potential cat moms and dads, yet every single place, it seems, is overflowing with animals.

To further complicate matters, the mere fact that shelters, no-kill or otherwise, are such a crapshoot (for every beneficent, heavenly animal-sanctuary story, there is an equivalent horror anecdote) often causes desperate pet owners to turn unwanted pets loose.

Don’t do that. If your cat, or dog, or whatever, must go, the best option is as follows: (1) Start looking for a new home at least one month in advance of your move. The good places all have waiting lists. (2) Find the good places. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Los Angeles (nonprofit, non-government-funded) is an excellent place to start. They have a 91 percent adoption rate. “We don’t have a period after which animals are euthanized,” officer Jeff Blodgett says. “We just hold the adoptable ones until they’re placed.” If there is room, the Long Beach and South Bay branches accept owner-initiated turn-ins.

The cats are housed in free-roaming catteries, not caged up, so they don’t go stir crazy in one little space, and the number of cats that stay in each room is capped, so they don’t get overcrowded. The SPCALA also maintains an online list of legitimate shelters and rescue groups. Call these people. Work the list. Because animal hoarding is a huge problem, SPCALA officers investigate each place. For instance, if the shelter won’t let the officers on the premises, it immediately does not make the cut.

The best option, however, is: (3) Get someone you know, someone trustworthy, to take the cat. Permanently.

In the end, this is what happened with Soy. Someone who knew someone responded to the mass e-mail. A woman who works as a city restaurant health inspector had been waiting for just such an e-mail about a cat looking for a home. “Soy is doing just fine,” the woman wrote. “She is very spoiled, she knows my schedule. When I wake up in the morning, she requires before I get out of bed that I scratch her tummy for a few minutes ... and she loves that bathroom faucet. Loves to drink from it, and occasionally she will sit in the sink, just like the first picture you sent me. She is a very good cat. Thanks for giving her to me.”

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Los Angeles, 5026 W. Jefferson Blvd., (888) SPCALA1 or www.spcala.com. For an SPCALA-referred list of shelters and rescue groups, http://spcala.com/resources/findhome.shtml.