Stories about rescues

Green yo (Negrinho): imagine visiting a friend at an apartment and seeing a raggedy, thin, thirsty and hungry black cat. We called him “the little black one” or negrinho in Portuguese. It was a delight to look forward to feed him and if we arrived between 7 a.m. and 7:30, he would be sitting under a cluster of areca palms, waiting for some food to be placed in a plastic dish. If I arrived after 7:30, I would either not see him or I might see his thin bottom walking north to wherever he was going to spend the rest of the day.

Pretty soon it became evident that it would be easier to have him part of our cat rescue group rather than running over to connect with him.So one morning in June 2019, I set up a trap and placed some food at the door of the trap, and he ate there and each day after that I pushed the food a little farther in, and he was about halfway in on the third day and when I pushed the food a little farther on Day 4, he would have nothing to do with it and he simply stayed outside the cage and glared at me, until I brought out the food from the cage. So I was a bit frustrated and I had a carrying case set up and I squatted on my heels and he eventually sat down about 5 ft away from me in the middle of the road, calm, with his eyes half closed. A voice inside told me, “Now.” And I leapt forward and grabbed him around the belly and I did not have gloves, but he was so surprised, he started chirping like a monkey. There's a YouTube video that shows some of his vocalizations, which we sometimes can produce by playing with him. And I dropped him into the carrying container and he made a lot of noise and did not want to be in there. So over the next week we kept him in a closet and he didn't want to come out and every time we put some food in, he hissed and clawed at us and we almost got hit. You'd think we would learn by then that it's a good idea to have leather gloves in our work. However, that didn't occur to us for about a year. And eventually he climbed up on some shelves that we had in the room and gradually came down from the shelves and spent some time on my bed. I call him the dragon, because when he purrs, it's loud and interrupted. And of course he has the fangs and the attitude of a creature that might do damage. So perhaps it's gratitude, perhaps he remembers what it's like to be on the street, and he's very happy to sit next to anybody who will rub his neck and chin, which you can see in another video... but I'm the guy he chases. If I walk into a bedroom, he runs in front of me and waits for me to sit on the bed. If I'm in the bedroom before he discovers it, he runs right up and attempts to lean next to my ribs. He is one of the reasons why we created Animals Come First.