Skip to main content

Parker and Jake



On September 2nd I lost my dog Parker very suddenly to a cancerous tumor that bled out in his abdomen. For those of you who follow this blog Parker was featured in a number of posts but most recently in a fun blog about my office affair. If you are like me, your pets are like kids. Even after I had a two legged child of my own, my dog was still very much my four legged child. So to have him pass away so suddenly has left a real hole in my heart.
Parker was a special dog that was famous in his own right. He was featured on an Animal Planet "adoption story" called Cooper, he was in Newsweek, USA today, The Times Dispatch and was in TV commercials for the Richmond SPCA because he was so well trained and represented the family dog so well. He was special to me and everyone who met him.
So while this is extremely sad for me and my family, it is in my nature to find the positive in any bad situation. About a week before Parker's sudden passing, I brought home a foster cat named Jake. Jake, or meathead as my son and husband calls him(he has a big head), has been a lifesaver to me. Jake has FIV. We would normally not place a cat with FIV but he was my favorite cat at the shelter, so I decided to bring him home and foster him while I find him a new home.
I must be honest, I love cats and have my favorites but I am not a cat owner, I foster instead. The only other cat I owned was again an FIV positive cat that we found living under our house in Richmond that we brought into the house and kept until she passed. But Jake is a little different from most cats. I call him my dog-cat. He begs for food, he meows when I come home to greet me, he rolls over to get his belly rubbed, he greets me in the morning and is always happy to sit on my lap and purr. He really is the perfect cat.
Fostering means so much to the animal you are caring for, but in this case I think the cat helped me out far more than I helped him out. So yes, Jake is up for adoption. As much as I appreciate his personality I can't keep him, this is only a temporary situation until we find him the right home. I like fostering cats and would like to continue to do so but if I have Jake I can't.
So here is a run down on Jake. Jake is some kind of Maine coon mix. His head is very large and he is lovely. FIV is an immune deficiency that a cat can live a very long life with. He is very loving, is fine with my 4 year old son, very litterbox trained, never destructive, not a fan of dogs but has lived with one but most importantly, he is content to lay on your lap all night or on the floor at your feet. He loves people. He would have to be an only cat or only live with another cat with FIV and he should never be an outside cat without supervision. If you are interested in Jake please contact me directly at makena@lynchburghumane.org and we can make arrangements for you to visit with Jake. I do suggest that you go on line and do research on FIV. Here is a link to one such article: http://www.bestfriends.org/theanimals/petcare/cats_fiv.cfm
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IS LHS UNDER ATTACK?

In 2013 the Lynchburg Humane Society (LHS) ended the year with a 92% save rate for the animals in our care, the highest year end figure since we began down the path to No Kill.   We were able to reduce the number of cats we took in by 294, compared to 2012, due primarily, we believe, to our spay/neuter efforts.   YOU made this possible.    We believe the Lynchburg Humane Society is about to be embroiled in a controversial attack by another humane organization because of all the great work we are doing.   We want our community and our supporters to know why and to be informed about this controversy because without you we could not do what we are doing.   You all are partners in our efforts.     This is long so please hang in there and read it in its entirety because there is important information throughout that you probably don’t know.    In April PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) sent us a letter askin...
49 comments
Read more

They know what they know so don’t give them the facts.

I had the pleasure of having an interesting conversation with a member of another humane organization this past weekend. They are an SPCA that takes in animals for a number of localities and operates as the pound for their area. She asked how we were doing in Lynchburg and I, of course, was excited to tell her about our recent success about our save rate being 84% and having no healthy animal lose their life in our shelter in 2010 and how much the community has embraced the changes as we move toward becoming No Kill. She immediately went to defense mode and asked me loaded questions to prove I was wrong and of course explain to me how our programs wouldn’t work for them. The appointment system, wouldn’t work – pet owners aren’t responsible enough to do the right thing. People must be just “dumping” their animals in other localities.” Fact : The counties that reported their stats for 2010 in the Lynchburg area saw a reduction in the number of animals they took in and more...
15 comments
Read more

When the tables turn

It is not unknown for people to be scared of dogs. Animal shelters throughout history were built on that fear. Dog catchers were employed to capture packs of nuisance dogs that were roaming and pestering communities. Pounds were built on the edge of towns near the dump to remove stray dogs from towns and in most cases, destroy them to prevent public endangerment.   Fast forward to now and shelters are referred to as centers, instead of strays we say adoptable, we don’t say animals we say pets, and dogs are family members. Getting a dog without a home into a family is a community effort and #adoptdontshop is a movement.  So how strange it is that the COVID-19 pandemic has made us fear being too close to people and has increased our desire for pets?  People want to foster or adopt pets, now more than ever! At the Lynchburg Humane Society’s Center for Pets there has been an increase of 85% more pets in foster care than at this time last year. The Lynchburg Humane...
Post a Comment
Read more