Rescue Tail / Ester’s One Year Anniversary
By Tara McFarland
A home for every animal. For every shelter worker and volunteer our greatest hope and dream is that each and every animal at our shelter is adopted. Until that adoption day, as a no time-limit shelter, every healthy adoptable animal will always remain in our care until that fateful day occurs. Here at our Marathon Campus, for our adult and senior cats that wait can be quite long. Currently our average length of stay is 400 days! That’s just over a year at our shelter until adoption day.
When one of our long term residents is finally adopted it’s cause for extra celebration! A year ago Nancy reached out to our Marathon Campus as a first time foster. With no pets of her own, she was interested in fostering an older cat for the first few months of 2020 when the world was shutting down and many local residents had extra time at home on their hands. With the hopes of giving an older cat a break from the shelter, and in turn have a quarantine companion, we asked Nancy if she would be willing to take Harley, our longest resident cat. With her big heart and desire to help the cat that needed her the most, Nancy enthusiastically said yes!
It had been three long years at the shelter for Harley. When Nancy arrived to take Harley home we informed her that it may be a bit of an adjustment period while Harley switched from shelter life to a home life. Thankfully we were wrong! On her first night in a home Harley curled up onto the bed and took a nice long nap. She moved from the bed to the chair to watch Animal Planet’s “My Cat From Hell” and decided quickly that she wasn’t going anywhere. She even trained Nancy to turn on the faucet in the bathroom so she could enjoy fresh flowing tap water. Within a couple of months, Nancy realized what Harley knew from the first day: she would be her forever cat. With just a few words, “How does it work if I want to be a foster fail?” we were all jumping for joy!
It’s hard to believe it’s been a year. Nancy sent us a wonderful adoption anniversary update. She says, “It is one year on March 31st that I picked up Harley, now Ester, from your shelter. I never met her before, I just picked her out online with your guidance. She’s been a very happy cat and I love having her in my life. I’ll never be without a cat! Her allergies are better with a cortisone shot every couple of months, no more scabs and she has all her fur. She loves her temptations and will only drink out of the tub faucet on command. She has made herself right at home!”
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