Fostering Saves Lives

 Meet Meep.  She is the poster child for why animal fostering is so important.

Upper Respiratory Infections (URIs) tend to thrive in shelters.  A URI to a healthy adult cat is like a cold; some are worse than others, but rarely fatal.  To a kitten, however, a URI is bad news.  For Meep it meant losing most of the vision in one eye, and stunted growth.  She weighs less than 2 pounds at 7 months of age.

Meep was special to all the workers and volunteers at The Marshmallow Foundation.  And when I started volunteering there she won my heart too.  Meep is the sloth of the kitten world - she doesn't move very fast, and would prefer to sleep upside down in the crook of someone's arm when possible.  I think she's at least part Ragdoll, which accounts for why she goes limp when picked up, although she doesn't have the characteristic blue eyes of a Ragdoll.

I wanted very badly to adopt Meep, but had already pushed the boundaries by adopting Maggie and Leo when still (temporarily) living with my brother and sister-in-law.  Would Meep survive until I moved into my forever home?  Poor Yunger didn't make it through the latest outbreak of URI, and he was much healthier than Meep to begin with.

Enter Cassi, a full-time employee at The Marshmallow Foundation.  Cassi is one of those unsung heroes that you don't hear much about because she prefers it that way.  When an animal has to be put down, Cassi is the one holding them until they pass. When Yunger was failing, Cassi was the one that reached out to try and find a rescue group that could help him.

Cassi knew that Meep wouldn't make it if she had to continue living at the shelter.  Her immune system was too compromised by endless rounds of antibiotics and illness.  The foster families were already full, so Cassi reached out to her mother for help.  If Meep were to have a fighting chance, she needed a quiet, safe environment with lots of tender loving care.  Cassi's Mom took Meep in with no questions asked, and provided me with regular updates on her progress.

One day while chatting with Cassi, I asked where her Mom lived.  Knowing that I probably wouldn't know where it was, Cassi told me it was a gravel road off of Highway 54 just outside of Detroit Lakes.  In one of those rare moments of synchronicity, I laughed and said that my new home was on that very same road.  Cassi lit up - her Mom and I were neighbors!

I'll be moving in to my new home very soon, and Meep will move in shortly after that.  I'll have to retrain her thinking a bit, since she's apparently a Vikings fan, but nobody's perfect.