In honor of #NationalAdoptAShelterPetDay, I wanted to share the story of how we adopted our most-loved cats, Fievel and Godzilla.
In June of 2014, my husband and I were living in an apartment for Albany for about a year. We had talked about adopting a cat when we lived in Ithaca, however, the apartment we lived in did not allow cats with claws, and we didn't want to engage in the practice of declawing.
Despite our conversations about adopting pets, we didn't do anything about it until one day my boss came in with a picture of new kittens on her phone.
Her sister volunteered with an animal rescue organization, and they had more kittens than they could handle (a fairly common spring event with kittens). I texted them picture to my husband with the note, "Can we adopt, please?" to which he responded "All of them?."
That afternoon, we went to go visit them. One of the kittens, one of the more friendly ones, took to us right away. They had been found on top of a garage and they liked being up high. There were seven cats in the litter. There were 1 grey kitten, 2 fluffy black kittens, and four short haired tabby kittens. Of the tabbies, three of them looked identical. One of the tabby cats, found that my husband's shoulder was the highest point he could get to, so kept climbing up there. We decided to adopt him. I called him Fievel after the mouse in An American Tail.
We had read that it can be better to adopt two kittens, especially if from same litter. I asked the rescue lady to keep an eye on who Fievel's friends were so we could take him home too.
We had to wait for them to get a little bigger and the we went to pick up Fievel. She said she had been watching him, and he got along great with all the cats. So we put the cat carrier down, and one of other tabbies ran right in after Fievel. So we adopted Fievel's identical twin too. I named him Godzilla, because of his ability to scamper up furniture when climbing.
We have now had Fievel and Godzilla living with us for almost four years now, and we love them so much. They love playing together, climbing all of our furniture, and they are very gentle with the new baby.
With my whole heart do I recommend adopting rescue pets, especially if you get the world's friendliest kittens!