the story / a história

Hello!
My name is Eloísa Valdes and I have 44 cats. This is my story…

Ever since I was a child we had cats in our house, but only one or two. This is how we got to the number of 44:

10 years ago a cousin of mine brought us a cat she had found near a dumpster. She couldn’t take it as her own for several reasons, so we took him in. His name is Quasar and he was already an adult cat, with quite a personality. It took us some months for him to trust us but ever since he did he was our companion. We sterilized (neuter/spay) him.

8 years ago a friend of my mother had 2 cats from her own kitty. She didn’t want them and was about to drown them and told my mother before she was going to do it. My mother took them in, because the thought of 2 new kittens being drowned was unbearable to her – and to me too! Their names are Sabrina and Tigrão. We didn’t neuter them. First because we couldn’t afford it, secondly because my mother thought they wouldn’t have kittens between themselves due to being siblings.

Years passed by and we were all happy with our 3 cats when, all of the sudden: BANG! One of the cats, Sabrina, had babies of her own brother. We only managed to give 2 male cats (Mozart and Beethoven), the others were female and nobody wants female cats in here. So, at this time we were with 6 cats. And again we couldn’t afford to neuter/spay them. The vet told us the best way to prevent more kittens would be the pill, since we didn’t had money for more.

Some months after this I was in the car heading school with my mother and I saw a cute lil fluffy ball near a forest by our house. We stopped and we found a kitten with her eyes all shut with an infection and some gooey sticky yellow thing in her eyes. We took her to the vet, who cured her for zero euros because we told the vet we had found the cat in the street. We kept her and named her Betinha. She had a very similar attitude as Quasar’s, and it took her a while to trust us too, but ever since, she was our companion. And there goes 7 cats.

Quasar, in the meantime, died of old age. 6 cats.

Years passed by and my mother got very sick and she missed giving the pills for 2 or 3 weeks because she couldn’t get out of bed for nothing. My grandmother was feeding the cats but didn’t had the pills in mind, and I wasn’t there at the time. My mother had to go into a surgery some time after this. Almost at the same time Sabrina had yet another bunch of newborns: 5.
Since my mother was going to be away from us for a whole week and my little baby brother (in spite of being allergic) was crazy for cats and crazy for my mom asked her to keep them, so he could be distracted off of my mother’s absence. My mother convinced my grandmother to let it be this way - after all, if we have 6 what harm can it be to have plus 5?, she asked.
At that point we then had 11 cats.

Betinha, who used to sleep with me in my room, went away after I started to be less and less there, and my mother wasn’t opening her the door of my room. My mother tried to put Betinha sleeping with the other cats, but Betinha was one of those very less social cats, she didn’t want to be with them, she’d only be with me… and I feel that she left because of that. She had food and water, she was healthy and she had love (whenever she wanted them, because, like I said, she had an attitude since day one), so I think she may have missed me… or my room! I know cats get attached to places…

10 cats.

In 2007 a friend of my mom (the same lady that wanted to drown the first 2 kittens we rescued) had another new cat that she did not want. We kept her and named her Lolita.
11 cats.

Lolita and the neighbour’s cat:

Lolita also had an attitude, so we kept her at our home while she was petite (french for little) and then we brought her to the other cat’s company to see if she befriended them. It lasted a month; she got sick due to a neighbors cat that had been wandering there with a sickness and whose owners did nothing about. We couldn’t do anything to help it because here we don’t have pounds covering our area and there isn’t a brigade to capture sick cats (at least not in our area, according to the vet) - plus, the cat had an owner, a owner who just didn’t took care of him. That cat died meanwhile, but not before he got 2 of our cats pregnant.

So, we took her to the vet (who at this time stopped curing our cats for free), cured her and when we were about to release her again to be together with the other cats (in the fields we have and also in an attachment to our house, where they sleep and eat) we noticed she was pregnant!!! She was so small, we couldn’t believe she was already able to bear children!!!

Lolita had 5 gorgeous lil kittens. All lady cats. Nobody wants them around here; even for males it is tough to get them homes, so imagine for females. We tried to find them homes, but all the people we knew who also loves cats already had many and didn’t want more. So, we kept them.
16 cats.

The Pills:

At this time we said: enough is enough: no more cats! We are going to give them pills even if they are too little upon our eyes to even bare kittens (having the example of lolita in mind, particularly).
Right…
We gave them but 2 other cats were already pregnant (still little, like Lolita!!) and had their babies - and voilá: 26 cats. Again, we asked everyone if they wanted kittens, but “NO” was the sharp answer we’d get, and got.

This takes us to this summer. A neighbor dropped 3 cats in our door. What were we supposed to do? Let them be there and starve to death? Call the police? We didn’t saw anyone, we don’t have proofs… and there isn’t a government plan for this in here - yes, this says a lot about our country, I know. I contacted SPA, which is a non-government org and they said nothing back. Not even a contact to whom may help. Nothing.
29 cats.

Anyway, in June of 2008 we were happy yet busy “owners” (irony here, cats can’t really be owned!!) of 29 cats and we were giving pills to all the cats ladies - since we couldn’t afford the neuter/spay/sterilization of them (not even when they were just 5) and some are very hard to pick up in regular days and take to a vet for a vaccination so we opted for the pills back then.

Now imagine our surprise when all of the sudden 4 of our lady cats started to have kittens pretty much all at the same time in JULY!!! Yes, it was mating season, you may think… We know about it, but we also knew we were giving them the pills… so, 20 new kittens between July/August, even though we gave them the pills was amazing for us - and we panicked!!! from these 20 kittens some of them died shortly after birth. I was told by the vet that happens when the kittys have many babies, that some of them just don’t make it. So we ended up with 44 cats!

We were like: How can this be? Pills are not working???
The only obvious choice here was to come to the conclusion that they must have spilled the pills after we give them – but surely only a long time after that, because we always used to be there with them after we gave the pills and we never saw them spill them!
My brother found out in late August a pill in the back of our garden, along with some puke.
This backs our spill-theory and takes us to a problematic: Pills aren’t working and we have many cats whom if not neutered/spayed soon will breed again!

That’s when I started to ask for help in www.deviantart.com. Help for money to be able to spay/neuter all those cats and STOP this madness, and help to be able to give some for adoption, so we can also have some rest. Because at the moment my mother spends her whole day cleaning, feeding, nurturing, cleaning, feeding, playing with them, cleaning some more, feeding…

What can we do, now?
We want to neuter/spay/sterilize them, but we can’t afford it!

Like many, my mother is unemployed, my father just completely forgot about us (when I was about 3years old anyway, so don’t worry, I don’t miss him – my mother always had been my mother and father at the same time) and he never even sent a dime to help my education nor even a bday postcard, and my grandmother is the only one who brings money home. Money that is applied in food for us and cats, school stuff for me who am studying in uni and meds for my brother, who has asperger’s syndrome with a very hard-core social phobia (which means he no longer studies at school - if he did we simply wouldn’t have enough money, cause school books and materials are VERY expensive here. Plus the meds. Damn. Don’t even get me started in there.).

So, we have 44 cats and pills don’t work.
We don’t have money to fix this and there isn’t a proper institution that does it for free that we know of. We are contacting every organization, but so far, no reply back.
People around here don’t want cats, especially female and they already started to look at us as some sort of cat’s rescue house and drop their pets here. Our neighbors even call our house the Cat’s Heaven!

We need your help to be able to spay/neuter the cats, so any money donations, even if little will help! If you can’t give us at least 5dollars/5euros, please take some time and share this site link with everyone you know!

Thank you!

P.S.: For more info see the rest of the site. “cat’s heaven” will be the page for updates, pictures, videos, etc. and “goals + help” will be the place where we talk more about out goals, and how you can help, from donations, to sponsorhip, and many other ways…

DISCLAIMER: SITE STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION. Thank you for your time and patience!

Portuguese version coming soon, too.