We took Tommy to the vet the weekend after we found him. This was before we had located the owner. We were becoming quite attached to Tommy and decided that if nobody stepped forward as his owner or as the perfect adoptive family, we'd welcome him into ours. We were eager to get a clean bill of health to allow us to start introducing him to the interested cats outside the bathroom. The vet commented that we had "found a good one." We agreed. What we found out next didn't change that, but required a completely new plan of action. His blood test came back positive for feline leukemia and FIV. This was a huge blow. It wasn't a death sentence for him, but it meant that he could not live with other cats and there was no keeping him. He would be competing, unfortunately, against many other homeless cats with no special needs. We had rescued Katie, one of our cats, two years ago and, when we couldn't find her owner, kept the kitty we had come to love. This was new territory. Scary territory.
Since we could no longer offer the safety net of keeping him, we had to contend with the fact that we had to find him a new home ASAP. It wasn't fair to him to keep him cooped up in our bathroom for much longer. The people who would have likely stepped up to help him (feline lovers or no-kill shelters) could not take him, as he posed a serious threat to other cats.
There were a few tears in the hours after his diagnosis, but I rolled up my sleeves up and got to work--because Tommy couldn't. I talked to many people in the Chicago shelter arena and one name kept coming up: Sheri Berliner. She's a local pet photographer (http://www.petraits.com/) who is also a very dedicated advocate for homeless animals in Chicago. As such, she takes photos of shelter dogs and cats in her studio setting, emails them to her list of 3600 local animal-lover contacts and posts them on petfinder.com. Her success rate in finding homes for homeless animals is phenomenal. The combination of her passion, talent and innate ability to capture the true spirit of an animal is evident in every photograph she takes. Even more amazing, she responded to my email within hours. And took Tommy's photos that same night. She wrote a bio to accompany Tommy's photos and so, twice-over, truly captured him. She is not interested in a quick fix, but rather a forever home. It shows.
With Sheri's photos and the hope that they would touch that one special person we needed to reach, Tommy's adventure continued. I was prepared for the worst, but hoped to find that needle in a haystack. There was a reason he found us.
2 comments:
Yes, a reason, indeed, that Tommy found you. All the phone calls and research you did paid off to find Sheri. It was so nice of her to respond to you quickly and take those incredible photos!
Such twists and turns....this story is like a book you can't put down! But, alas, we must wait for the next installment of TOMMY!!
waiting patiently for Tommy Part III.
la de da de daaa....
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