Pops in his bed at Good Mews

This is Pops. We don’t know any­thing about his life prior to about ten days ago, when an anony­mous woman near Can­ton found him in her yard dur­ing the worst of our recent bit­ter cold spell. He was ema­ci­ated to the point of star­va­tion, dehy­drated, hypother­mic, and gen­er­ally in very bad shape. She brought him inside, gave him warmth, water, and food, and began search­ing for a place to take him.

Clearly Pops is no feral cat, but most likely someone’s long-​time pet who had for some rea­son been left to fend for him­self. He doesn’t show typ­i­cal feral behav­ior, and his poor phys­i­cal con­di­tion is evi­dence that he wasn’t used to sur­viv­ing on his own.

For­tu­nately it’s been a very good adop­tion month at Good Mews, so we had a space for him. First, though, we got Pops to a vet, who treated the hypother­mia over sev­eral days, gave him flu­ids and food slowly and care­fully, and med­ically eval­u­ated him. Tests showed that he appears to be between twelve and fif­teen years of age, which makes him Good Mews’ old­est cur­rent res­i­dent. He also turns out to have hyper­thy­roid, which is treat­able in cats just as it is in humans. His ini­tial weight was a mere five and a quar­ter pounds, which is sim­ply hor­rific. The pads of his feet are all torn up, and his teeth are in such bad shape that dry food is dif­fi­cult for him to eat. Chances are most, if not all, of them will have to come out when he has his dental.

Pops’ age and con­di­tion make me won­der if, when his prior owner found out about the med­ical issue, they just chose not to deal with it, or him, at all. If that’s the case, well, there’s a spe­cial place in hell for those people.

Now that we’ve got­ten Pops into the shel­ter, he’s slowly improv­ing. His weight is up over six pounds already, though we can still feel every sin­gle bone in his body. He’s start­ing to real­ize that he doesn’t have to be food-​aggressive, because there’s plenty there and it’s not going to run out. In fact, the chal­lenge is to just give him small amounts at a time so he doesn’t overeat and make him­self sick.

His energy level is still very low, and it’s clear he’s still got a ways to go before he’s com­pletely recov­ered. He’s still not strong enough to groom him­self well, so Joyce Fet­ter­man has been work­ing on him bit by bit get­ting the knots and mats out of his coat. We could shave him, I sup­pose, but he needs what coat he has to keep him warm. Besides, as I com­mented today, “leave him what lit­tle dig­nity he has left.”

With all he’s been through, though, he is a love! He’s been jus­ti­fi­ably wary since he arrived, but we vol­un­teers have been lov­ing on him and try­ing to reas­sure him that he’s safe now, he’s cared for, and the night­mare is over. Appar­ently we’re get­ting through to him. The notes on the Cat Cat­a­log say he loves to be held. Also, this after­noon both Joyce and I were with him at sep­a­rate times, and we both heard him very qui­etly, ten­ta­tively purr as we cud­dled and pet­ted him.

Cats like Pops are why I make my own small con­tri­bu­tion to the ani­mal res­cue cause.