How “the hugging cat” came home

caro:

I’ve posted plenty of photos (probably too many), but I did promise a few people a blog post about how it came to be that I emerged from JFK airport off a red-eye last Saturday morning with a small gray cat in my possession. So here it is.

We have an internal email list at Google called Catpeople, which is pretty much exactly what you’d think it would be. It consists mostly of employees from our Mountain View headquarters, and it’s full of messages about everything from kitty litter preferences to vet recommendations. And there are a lot of messages about cats who need new homes. In Silicon Valley, where there’s a lot of open space on office campuses, it’s not uncommon for feral cat populations to spring up in the backyards of some of the biggest technology companies in the world. Google is no exception, and some employees even started an adoption program called GCat Rescue to place kittens found on our corporate campus with foster or adoptive homes in the area.

Sometimes, though, the requests on this email list are personal appeals from other Googlers who have to give up a cat, and those are often the ones that can really get emotional. When I was in Austin for SXSW, I was checking my email and saw a Catpeople message from a Mountain View-based colleague who needed to find homes for the two cats he and his family had been fostering before they moved to a house that would not let them keep them (they had two other cats of their own in addition to a black Labrador). One of the cats was described as a small gray female whom the Googler’s three young daughters called “the hugging cat” because of her tendency to jump in your lap, put her paws on your shoulders, and nuzzle your neck. The girls loved her and were adamant that she find a real home instead of going to a shelter.

I thought the part about “the hugging cat” was cute, but I forgot about the whole thing until two weeks later, when on a Wi-Fi-equipped United flight from JFK to SFO, the Googler with the cats posted a more desperate message and said that time was running out, all no-kill shelters in the area were full, and no one had stepped in to adopt either of the cats. Maybe it was because I was drinking a glass of red wine at 37,000, but I suddenly got very emotional and decided that I was going to take “the hugging cat” home with me.

I didn’t know how I’d get her back across the country, hadn’t told my roommate about the new furry friend, and in spite of how much I love cats have very little experience with caring for them long-term beyond my family’s psychotic tabby who lives in the basement and silently plots how she’s going to murder us all in our sleep. I decided I would figure out the details later.

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Caro is my hero.