Below is a post I sent to the feline-cancer group at YAHOO. I am the group owner, and Sandra had sent an email to the group requesting help in finding homes for these cats in October 2009.
I posted this to that group 11/3/2009, so that people would know what had happened and why I was no longer working on this.
I have since heard from 3 separate people about her posting about her need to find a home for these cats on at least 3 different forums.
I feel very sorry for the cats. I still have no idea what is going on with the owner, but wish I could get the cats out of what is obviously a distressed environment.
The information in the post below will hopefully clear up some of the confusion about whether rescue groups placed the cats and whether the cats were then returned to Sandra.
Anyone who wants more information is welcome to contact me at
[email protected] .
Best wishes,
Nancy
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[Originally posted 11/3/2009]
PERMISSION TO CROSSPOST WIDELY, and please forward to anyone to whom you sent the previous request for help for these cats
Hi All,
This is a difficult post to write. I have helped in many instances over the past 10 years to place cats whose people have died, become disabled and unable to care for their cats any longer, or people with terminal diagnoses. I have never come across a situation at all like this one.
It is a complicated and long story, so I will summarize it first, and put the details at the bottom, so that you can skip them if you like. However, if you forwarded any of the original requests for help, I ask that you forward this entire post, so that people will know what they are getting into (as much as possible).
Sandra M. originally emailed the feline-cancer group at Yahoo on 10/10/2009, stating that she had received a terminal cancer diagnosis and had only 1 month to live, and requested help placing her cats.
It turns out that she is looking ONLY for local homes for her 2 cats, so she is interested in placing them only in the Toronto area. I didn't find out what radius she has in mind, but she indicated that one cat is an extremely poor car traveller, so I am guessing she means fairly close to her current location.
She is absolutely not interested in placing the cats outside of the Toronto area, so please do not attempt to offer to place them outside that area. I hope that this will limit the number of people who need to read the remainder of this post.
I truly hope that someone can help Sandra find a home for her cats, if that is what she truly wants.
THE DETAILS:
Sandra lives in Toronto, and I live in Tampa, FL; but I have helped place cats long distance before so I emailed her with suggestions and an offer of help.
She emailed back. Both in email and over the phone, she was aware that I live in Florida. I suggested she draw up a poster with a good photo of the cats and a description of the cats and what kind of home she was looking for. I specifically asked her if homes with children would be good for her cats, and if there were any geographical restrictions on where the cats could be placed. She did not respond to the question on geographical restrictions. People had already emailed both her and me offering help with transport. She did not mention any restrictions on geographical locations for the cats' placement until more than a week after I had started working with her on this, and by which point I had already spent a significant amount of time on this situation.
Linda K., who some of you may know from our group and the feline crf group, and who runs a rescue in Florida a couple hours north of Tampa, received a response to emails she had sent out looking for help for Sandra's cats the same day Sandra posted to the group. Amazingly, she found a woman in Toronto who was possibly interested in the cats. Linda requested more information on the cats. At that point I didn't have much, but was due to hear from Sandra the following day (Sunday) and told her I would get back to her as soon as possible.
When I did hear from Sandra a couple of days later and reviewed her poster and made some suggestions, I forwarded a finished version to Linda to forward to the woman she knew in Toronto. The next day, Linda indicated that the woman wasn't interested. I asked why, and Linda said the woman didn't say why, but the woman did say she was aware of these cats' situation.
I reported to Sandra that the woman was not interested, and Sandra asked if I knew why. I repeated what Linda K. had told me, and said I didn't really understand what the woman meant by saying she was already aware of these cats' situations.
At this point, Sandra told me (for the first time) that she had tried to place the cats due to her own health issues on two previous occasions: once around 2005/2006, and again in early 2008. During these previous occasions local (Toronto) rescues and individuals had offered placements, most of which Sandra rejected for various reasons. She was not always honest with the prospective adopters about her decision (for example, she told one potential adopter that she had found a home for the cats, when in fact she didn't approve of his home for her cats but had not actually found another home for them). Sandra said that her friends had urged her to place them during the 2008 round, but she "loved them too much" to do so.
At this point, I did not know what was really going on with Sandra, but I decided to ignore the incongruities that were appearing. My reasoning was that:
[1] the cats needed a new home, regardless of what is really going on with Sandra,
[2] that I didn't really care about the details of what was going on with Sandra per se, and
[3] that my only interest was in helping cats who needed a new home to find one.
I let Sandra know this, but also let her know that her revelations left me in need of some additional information in order to place the cats. My feeling was that she had tried to place these cats before, had received assistance from rescues and/or individuals and she had then rejected most of their help -- and not always honestly. Her requests for help also had been on the internet. So there were going to be lots of folks out there who had either been involved in the previous placement attempts, or who had heard about them, and obviously some of them were none to happy with the way their help had been (not) utilized. The woman in Toronto that Linda K. had located was a case in point.
I sent Sandra a list of 7 questions, the information from which I felt would help us get out in front of the problems caused by her previous placement attempts. One of these questions was, given that she had tried to place them before and then changed her mind, what could she do to reassure potential helpers/adopters that she would not change her mind again.
She replied, implying that I was trying to get her medical records, and also accusing me of being mean to her like other people on the internet had been to "a friend" who tried to help in at least one of the previous placement efforts. I reassured her that I was not interested in her medical records -- only in helping her place her cats -- and that I did not feel I was being mean. I felt I was doing what needed to be done to place her cats in a short amount of time, in an environment which had been contaminated by her previous placement attempts.
She indicated that she was too ill to answer a lot of questions by email but she could by phone. Due to what had already transpired, I preferred written answers from her. I told her that she did not have to give lengthy answers: a sentence or two per question would do. She responded with an email answering two of the questions in a fairly long-winded fashion, and then gave a lengthy explanation of how she was too ill to write a long email.
Although I had told her that the person named Linda that had been helping out was someone here in Florida -- because she repeatedly asked about her, multiple times both in email and once by phone -- she accused me of talking to someone named Linda Weeks behind her back My impression from her accusation is that Linda W. is someone she dealt with at a Toronto cat organization back on one of her previous placement attempts.
Sandra indicated that she preferred to "block out" her previous placement attempts. I indicated that I personally was not comfortable with that, and in this case did not think it would work. I said that in order to continue helping her, I needed answers to the questions I had sent, and I needed the effort going forward to be upfront with people about the history of the attempts to place these cats.
At this point, Sandra called and left a long voicemail on my phone. Only now did she tell me that she wanted only local homes for the cat. Although we had talked at length about how I was in Florida and so was Linda K. who was helping, she said she thought I (or Linda) was in Toronto. And there was no way that homes could be found from Florida, because what I said or arranged could not legally be enforced in Toronto, she said. This is also when she told me that the one cat was such a poor traveller. She said that she didn't want to get too involved with the internet again [in terms of placing the cats] because there were a lot of horrible people on the internet who had bashed her "friend". Her friend had told her there were a lot of vicious people on the internet, she said. And she said that she thought I had probably seen her internet request for help from early 2008 (I'm not sure what that had to do with anything, but my first knowledge of her was her recent posting to the feline-cancer list; I had not seen any of her previous requests).
Of course, this left me wondering why she had come to the internet and asked for help in the first place after having had such a bad experience. Since she mentioned the previous year's internet request and how mean people had been to her friend, I did search and found the two links below. I didn't really see anyone being mean to her friend, although there did seem to be some misunderstandings on the friend's part of what people were trying to say.
Some of her previous attempts to place the cats are documented at
http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/detail/583765
http://petoftheday.com/talk/showthread.php?t=138101
and
http://www.catster.com/forums/Shelters_Rescue_and_Fostering/thread/482460 .
To summarize: Sandra has been searching for several years to place her cats in new homes, due to what she says are health reasons. I don't know that to be either true or untrue, and I really don't care. It isn't Sandra I'm trying to help, but her cats, so to me, Sandra's illness (or lack thereof) are irrelevant.
I did hear from several other people had tried to help Sandra on her previous placement attempts. They expressed frustration at having put forth a serious effort to help her, only to have her change her mind. One of the stories sounded remarkably like mine, with the person putting in a significant amount of time trying to help place the cats, and after much work on her part, Sandra told her that she wanted only local homes. Which does make me wonder why Sandra didn't mention that at the beginning of my attempt to help her.
When I insisted that she be forthright with people if I were to continue working with her to help place her cats, that is when she called and basically told me she no longer wanted my help. She said my attempts to help were upsetting here, and that there were too many vicious people on the internet and she therefore didn't want to get involved with people on the internet again.
It seemed that any time a possible solution came up, Sandra came up with reasons why that wouldn't work.
My hope in writing up my experience is that others will not waste the time that I (and many others) have wasted -- for example on trying to find homes for the cats outside of Toronto. Although she has been through this process at least three times, she neglected to mention that until she no longer wanted my help.
This email is already way too long, or else I would append the collection of emails that went back and forth between us. If anyone is interested in seeing the emails, the poster, or other photos she sent me of the cats, feel free to email me.
I did check in with her last week, and she had not found a home for her cats.
Nancy