Adopting Baxter
*You can read the first part of Baxter's adoption story here.*
We walked into the shelter and Baxter was in a large cage, straight in front of us. He was huge! I made my way to the front of his cage and stood there a moment, just watching him. He barely moved forward to check us out. Mandy was right; Baxter was depressed. See, Baxter had been living in a cage for 3 months because he was FIV positive. I could tell that he had just about given up. I promised him at that moment that he would never have to live in a cage again. A shelter employee walked by and asked if he could help us. "We're here to adopt this lil dude," I said. "Oh. You know he's..." I interrupted him. "Yep, I know. We still want him."
Mandy and Tiane came out of their offices to help us. Tiane took Baxter out of his cage and led us to an office to give us some time with him while I filled out the paperwork. Baxter let us pet him, even let John hold him, but he was very weary of the attention. We all knew what he was thinking. "Sure, you'll let me out now but you're gonna stick me right back in that cage like always." He looked so defeated. We talked with Tiane a bit about the FIV and then she started to pick up Baxter to put him in our carrier. Right at the worst possible moment, another shelter cat came flying over the ledge in the window of the closed door. Baxter clawed up Tiane's arm so bad she bled and the two cats started an epic standoff. Hissing, growling... We finally got the other cat out of the room. And I stood there trying so hard not to laugh. That wasn't funny. The funny thing was that while all this was going on, several shelter employees had gathered outside the room, peeking inside the door with wide eyes. And I could just tell what was going through their minds: "Someone finally wants to adopt him and he's going to scare them off!" LOL
I felt terrible about Tiane's bleeding arm but we weren't scared off. Baxter didn't say a word on the drive home. I've never had such a quiet car ride with a cat in my life. We got him set up with food and water in our master bathroom to give him -and Scrubby- some time to get used to the new arrangements. We opened the door on the carrier but he stayed in it, still being very quiet. Meanwhile, we took Scrubby to get his FIV vaccination. I'm happy to say, he tolerated it very well and didn't have any adverse reactions to it. I'll talk more about the vaccine and FIV in another blog post.
We got back and Baxter was still laying inside the open carrier and wouldn't come out despite my gentle coaxing. So I folded a towel in half and started to tuck it under him. He let me do it but still didn't budge so I had to just shove a little at a time underneath him till the towel was all the way to the back of the carrier. As I finished, I heard this tiny sound. Baxter was purring! It was as if he'd recognized that towel as a small act of kindness, and hey, maybe this lady wasn't going to shove him back into a cage again after all! It was the quietest and sweetest purr I'd ever heard in my life. I started to love on him and slowly but surely his little tiny purr got a lil bit louder. A lil more confident. It was a truly beautiful moment. And I knew without a doubt that we'd made the right decision in adopting Baxter.
