Scooter - Our Christmas Miracle Cat

The cat who didn’t come back

Scooter’s mother and siblings were barely surviving in the shell of an abandoned truck out in the country. We successfully tender-trapped them all and brought them to AAS’s beautiful, sunny shelter, which had six rooms, all with wide windows. Six rooms allowed us to keep tiny kittens, who needed bottle-feeding, separate from sick kittens being treated, separate from healthy kittens who needed lots of room to play, from sick feral adults, from healthy feral adults, and one room for fresh intakes.

Scooter’s siblings all tamed nicely and got good homes. But not Scooter - he stayed wild and crazy, hiding under furniture so no one would touch him. Volunteers all tried to tame him but he would scratch and leap out of anyone’s arms who managed to pick him up. We thought we might have Scooter for the rest of his life.

Until Debbie, who had never had a cat before, came looking for a nice, easy, sweet kitten to adopt. She spotted Scooter under a couch, and while we warned her, lay on the floor, and pulled a hissing, twisting Scooter out, sat on the couch with him, and refused to let him go. We all watched, stunned, as Debbie stroked and whispered to him. It took an hour, but Scooter finally calmed down enough for us to put him in a carrier and for Debbie to take him home. We all said, she’ll be back, either later today or tomorrow at the latest.

With some trepidation, we phoned Debbie a few days later. Everything was fine. Scooter was settling in. We called several months later and were asked to come over for tea with Scooter. When we got there, Scooter was lazing around in “his” chair in his Hallowe’en costume. Debbie said that the kids thought Scooter was so funny! Kids? Scooter likes kids? At Christmas we came to see him in his Christmas costume. And in the Spring, in his cocktail party costume. It turned out that it was cats Scooter hated, but it took a woman like Debbie to find that out.