A New Home

Today is a very special day for me. Today is the day that our little orange kitty Oscar went to his new home. Last November, we found this guy lurking around the back of our house. Jasper and I knelt down and called; “here kitty, kitty!” To our surprise, he came over to us. We came to the conclusion that he must be a stray, as we’d never seen him before among the feral cats of our neighborhood and he wasn’t neutered. We carried him to our garage where we set out a litter pan, food and water. We named him Oscar, after “Oscar, cat-about-town” from the book all creatures great and small by James Herriot. Upon closer inspection, we found that Oscar had an abscess at the base of his tail and ear mites. Oscar was active, but his injury was weakening him and would soon become fatal. We would have taken him to the vet, but at the time we couldn’t afford it. As his condition worsened, he began to lose energy. Mom called the rescue organization S.P.O.T. and they told us that they could pay all of the vet bills as long as we would adopt him. We took our little boy to the vet and he had surgery to remove the abscess, was neutered and had his ear mites removed. When we took Oscar home, he had to wear an Elizabethan collar which is basically a plastic cone worn around the neck of an animal to prevent it from licking the wounded area. We applied a paste to the wound twice daily called thermazene to help it heal faster. Soon, Oscar was healed and we were able to remove his cone. After six weeks of isolation he was allowed to live in the house, but was always rather skittish. We figured that it must have been the fact that he lived with five other cats, so we began to search for a one-cat-home for the little guy. After about a year, the perfect place turned up. It was a large homestead and the family that lived there was willing to take him as their barn cat. Today they came to pick him up, and our little boy finally had his happy ending.