From 43things.com:
Mike and I have been thinking of getting a cat ever since we started looking for a house of our own. When we visited the house we are currently living in for the first time, our first reaction was to say: “This is a cat’s house!” Indeed, the house feels so cozy and warm that I feel like it was made for a cat to live in. We started thinking about it more and more and even came up with a name: Doodle. Doodle is a pretty random name that I imagined. I like it because it sounds soft and sweet and it is not a common name for a cat.
After living here for about a month, we started looking for a kitty more actively. Given the number of poor cats that are abandoned every year, we definitely chose to adopt from a shelter. We visited several: the Northeast Animal Shelter in Salem, Peabody Animal Life Savers, the Protection of Animals in Wakefield Society and the Methuen Animal Care and Adoption Center.
Those four shelters are very diverse. The shelter in Salem is what I had in mind when I was thinking of a shelter: it is located at the back of an animal hospital and available cats and dogs live in pretty small cages. However, the nice thing is that they don’t euthanize the animals that are surrendered to them.
The Peabody Animal Life Savers (or Pals) is located inside the store Petsmart, a few blocks down the road after the Northeast Animal Shelter. It only has cats and the adoption fee is pretty high ($140 per cat) but the volunteers are very nice and they let us pet the cats and talk with them in the back room. Their premises are pretty small so they don’t have that many cats.
In contrast, the shelter in Methuen is gigantic. Along with cats, they rescue dogs, rabbits, hamsters, rats, guinea pigs, ferrets and even farm animals such as goats, cows, pigs, horses, sheep, chickens and ducks. Some of the cats there are in cages but others are living in what they call “community rooms” that they share with 4 or 5 other cats. Several cats appealed to us there: Mike liked Ruthie and I liked Branigan but none of them really jumped at us immediatly.
However, when we visited the shelter in Wakefield – located inside the animal hospital – we fell in love right away with Coco. But first, let me give a little more details about the Protection of Animals in Wakefield Society (or PAWS). The Wakefield shelter is no regular animal shelter. Indeed, Instead of living in cages, cats live in foster homes (located in Wakefield, Stoneham and Woburn) while they are waiting to be adopted. The shelter is open on Saturdays and it is up to the foster family to decide if they want to bring the cats they are taking care of or not. Last Saturday, when we visited the shelter, only one cat was actually there: Coco (it is her in the picture).
Coco is a very sweet 1-year old girl. She is a brown tiger with beautiful green eyes. We got to pet her and she seemed to really enjoy it. From what we saw, she is pretty calm and very affectionate. We really had a crush on her right away. We gave an application to the shelter and they sent a message to Coco’s foster family so that they could arrange a time this week for us to come see Coco at their place. We haven’t heard from them yet but we can’t wait to see Coco again.
Now, there is something I am wondering. We were thinking of naming our cat Doodle and I am not sure if it would be appropriate to change Coco’s name to Doodle. According to a volunteer in Peabody, you can change a cat’s name, especially when they are young and Coco is pretty young. It wasn’t easy to find opinions on the Internet about changing a cat’s name, but I did find this discussion where most of the people are encouraging it (or at least most do not see anything wrong with it):So I think that if we get Coco, which I dearly hope, we are going to rename it Doodle.
No comments:
Post a Comment