The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is: What’s a moment when a stranger completely restored your faith in people?

I know that not every society has the same interactions and relationships with pets that I grew up experiencing. My wife grew up believing that she was an experienced pet person, having had both cats and dogs as a child. But they were outdoor animals, what we’d call ‘barn animals’ where I’m from. Like most people in her country, she had never snuggled with a dog on her bed or had a cat insist on curling up on her lap. These weren’t part of her culture’s concept of pet.

And we live in her culture.

I have to remind myself of that when I interact with other people here. Many of them, by their definition, are pet people.

As we’ve grown into our roles as cat rescuers, I’ve had a hard time not being judgmental of how neighbourhood ‘pet people’ treat their cats. There was one other family on our street who rescued cats, like us. But they never neutered their rescues, and had a continual stream of new kitten arriving. This of course overwhelmed them, so they just let the whole batch, about fifteen cats, go loose into the neighbourhood. Then they moved away. We think they took a few of the youngest kittens and hopefully a mother, but that vast majority were just left to fend for themselves.

We really don’t know what happened to most of them.

We have another neighbour who has claimed one of the local feral cats as hers. This cat somehow broke one of his fangs, it was sticking straight forward out of his mouth. When I told her about this, and that he needed a vet, he was suddenly no longer her cat, just a stray she feeds. When we suggested we could take him to a vet and then re-home him, she screamed at us to leave her cat alone. So he’s ‘her’ cat as long as she doesn’t need to help him.

Now, I have a heart condition, and one of the best preventative measures for it is just walking. So I used to go for long walks around our neighbourhood every morning around sunrise. I’d usually do a three-kilometre loop that involved crossing a few roads that can be busy at that time of day. This is an area where people dispose of unwanted cats (which is our cat rescue origin story). It’s also an area where various people have adopted, in the local sense, outdoor cats (it’s more like sponsoring a team fora season, which is better than nothing).

I know the cats along my route much better than the people.

There’s the clan of black cats that live by the golf course sheds, the two torties who stay outside the medical clinic (which feeds them), the white cat that lives beside the Bishop’s house, and the beautiful long-hair whose humans only occasionally let her out onto a window sill where she can regally look down on us all.

There’s one cat, I’d hate to call her two-face because that sounds insulting. She’s a tortie whose colour scheme divides along her nose, so one side of her face is dark and the other light. She had humans looking after her, near the far end of my daily route. When they moved out, they left her behind. I started carrying wet food with me, and feeding her. But she was starting to follow me home. I didn’t want her to try to cross the busy road, so I’d feed her and scoot while she was eating.

In passing one day, while feeding her, I mentioned to a woman that this cat had been abandoned. Her son, a teen, overheard and took it upon himself to start feeding her dry food daily. That was December of last year. My heart started acting up, and I stopped my walking routine for a couple of months. I always worried what had happened to that cat.

By the end of February, I was back to walking. That cat came running out from a different house, and started rubbing against my legs. A man came out and we talked. It was his son who had taken on the cat. And they were still feeding her. It was such a burden off my soul to know that she was at least back to the safety that she’d always known. She seemed happy, and healthier than when I’d seen her last. And she rubbed up against the man’s legs as well as mine, so she trusts him, too.

Found family is great and yes, restores my faith in people.