neuralgia.

My wife and I have been looking to get a cat for our household ever since we moved in. Now, about 6 months after moving in, we welcomed our first cat.

We adopted Arlo from SPCA right on the day we visited him for the first time. Prior to adopting Arlo, we tried other adoption agencies, most notably Luni.

Personally I always believe in adopting over buying and have very little appeal for fancy purebreds that most cat owners seem to be crazy about. However, we aren’t particularly saints either, choosing to adopt kittens with no health problems. I guess this makes us somewhat picky adopters, but I digress.

We had all our windows, with the exception of the aircon ledge window and our bathroom windows, fully meshed. We left 3 of those windows out because we don’t ever open them. We even opted to mesh the “dead” window in our master bedroom despite it not being very accessible and remaining fully closed since the day we moved in.

For the gate, I procured 1-meter tall, 3mm transparent acrylic panels and employed the help of a handyman to have it installed with cable ties. Honestly, I thought that was enough, until I contacted Luni and this happened:

My take is that 2-meter vertical jump comment is exaggerated, since I am around 180cm tall. But this was the start of a new pattern I eventually recognized in these adoption agencies – If, on one spectrum, there are supposedly “superficial” cat owners who buy cats for their looks, ignoring and exacerbating the problem of unethical cat breeding, and there’s folks like me who want to adopt but are picky about it sitting in the middle, then some of these gate-keeping adoption folks are all the way at the other extreme.

From Luni’s reply, I procured a plastic mesh and DIY-ed the rest of the gate such that it’s fully covered, making sure to secure any existing loose ends using cable ties:

The Luni folks approved it:

We received that response and immediately reached out to the fosterer. A meeting was arranged with her on the subsequent week. However, prior to that, we booked an appointment with SPCA to visit Arlo. The day we visited Arlo was also the day we finalized his adoption. This is, of course, after SPCA verified we have meshed everything and have the necessary kitten room and supplies prepared.

It’s worth noting that Arlo only took 3 days before he became too comfortable with our home. I subsequently cancelled the appointment with Luni’s fosterer.

Funnily enough, SPCA pointed out that we should get restrainers for our bathroom windows. It was thoughtful of them to suggest it, really.

We’re now about 2 weeks in with Arlo, and he’s been an absolute dear. But I did notice he seems to be getting bored and keeps mewing for me to play with him. So I reached out to Cat Society and went through yet another round of checks for cat-proofing. This is the result:

It appears that both the window and gate meshing failed Cat Society’s check, even though it passed Luni’s and SPCA’s checks.

More importantly I learned that adoption agencies don’t have a set standard on how much cat-proofing is adequate across themselves. Having cat-sat before and having been to friends with cats both adopted and bought, I thought we have done above and beyond to secure our home to house our new family members. I can see why potential adopters may get discouraged by the inconsistencies across adoption agencies and end up just buying a cat from a breeder, simply because it’s so much easier.

But it is what it is. The important thing is that we have Arlo now, and he’s safe and happy in our home.