Success Story

In our business, we get all kinds of calls to help feral community cats. They range from simple trappings for spay/neuter to more adventurous outings. We've plucked month-old kittens from a plum tree, crawled through an attic in pursuit of a mom and newborn kittens, helped cats trapped under a sealed-up apartment building basement, relocated unadoptable feral cats to farms and ranches to be used for rodent control. rescued 21 feral cats living at an abandoned foreclosed home, and many more scenarios. But one that particularly sticks out in my mind is when we got a call from a homeowner who discovered a mom and newborn kittens in their wine basement. This basement held over 100 cartons of various wines. We could barely move under there. My co-worker and I spent hours moving the boxes out to try and locate where mom had delivered her kittens so we could move them to the Marin Humane Society and let her continue nursing until the kittens could be fostered and she could be spayed. Once we had all the boxes out, we discovered a hole in the basement flooring that led to a sub-basement! The hole was only about a foot wide, but it appeared mom had moved the kittens there and left them. They were not able to get back out and would have surely died. I have claustrophobia but needed to crawl into that hole and shimmy to the other end of the basement where the kittens were hiding. I was having anxiety attacks in the dark, musty sub-basement so my co-worker kept talking to me to ease my panic. Seven-and-a-half hours later we had all 3 kittens in our car. Each one was eventually adopted and we caught mom a few days later, had her spayed, and returned her to the homeowners.