Sometimes people choose a cat, but more often than not, cats choose people. That’s how the Cat Distribution System works. You’re going about your life, minding your own business, when BOOM. Suddenly, there’s a cat, and just as suddenly, it’s yours. Don’t question it.
Here’s a fresh “for instance” that illustrates exactly how the distribution system works.
The smallest thing can trigger the Cat Distribution System
My daughter, Avery, and her husband Eric moved from the West Coast to Minnesota a few weeks ago. They were excited to find a pet-friendly apartment so they could finally get a cat, which they’ve wanted to do since they got married last year. However, with the expense of the move, they’d decided to wait a few months. They figured they’d get settled, get their first paychecks, and then look for a cat to adopt.
Apparently, just thinking about getting a cat was enough to trigger The System, though. Yesterday, they’d just pulled into a parking spot at the Owatonna Hy-Vee grocery store when something small and orange caught Eric’s eye.
“Eric saw over my seat that there was a kitten behind the front left wheel of the car next to us, just like peeking his little head out,” Avery tells me. “And we were like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a kitten! There’s a kitten right there.’ And so we got out and went up to it. And it kind of got scared right away, and it climbed up into the underneath of the car, right before we could get it.”
The scared kitten hid, but also told them where he was
Eric went into the store to get help and buy some Churu treats to lure the kitten out of the car frame. Two employees took the car information and made a store announcement paging the owner. In the meantime, a woman stopped to help Avery try to retrieve the kitten, but to no avail.
“Eventually more and more people kind of started showing up,” Avery says. “Like a couple of the Hy-Vee employees came out. The general manager of the Hy-Vee came out in his work uniform, or in his slacks and nice shirt. And Eric came back with some other people.”
All in all, eight strangers came together to rescue the tiny, scared kitten from its hiding place. The car owner, who happened to be a store employee, had no clue about the kitten but surmised that the little guy must’ve hitched a ride to work with him from Faribault, about 20 miles away.
Thankfully, the kitten was vocal and loud, so it wasn’t hard to find where he was located in the car. With a little teamwork, they finally managed to pull him from the engine well. The first thing they noticed was that he was itty bitty and very skinny. The second thing was that he was covered in fleas. His eyes appeared gunky, too, with one of them basically sealed shut.
Avery wrapped the little orange kitten up in a blanket from the car and thanked everyone who’d helped them. Then off to the vet they went.
Getting checked out at the vet
On the ride there, the starving kitten downed two Churu packets. He seemed less scared and more relaxed now that he wasn’t alone and hiding. They arrived at the Fairview Animal Medical Center in Owatonna about 30 minutes before it closed.
“We take the little bundle of blankets in,” Avery shares. “They were already helping somebody, and this lady over in the back was like, ‘I can help you with something. Do you need help with something?’ And I was like, ‘We found a cat in the parking lot.’ And she was like, ‘Oh?’ And I showed her his tiny little head, and she was like, ‘You did! You did find a cat in the parking lot!’”
After checking him out, they confirmed that he had “hella fleas” and some bacterial conjunctivitis in his eyes. But other than some hunger and dehydration, he was in good shape. No broken bones, no injuries. The vet estimated that he’s about 8 weeks old. It was quite clear no one had been caring for him.
‘Do we keep him? Can we keep him?’
“At that point, we were still pretty on the fence of like, ‘Can we take him?’” Avery says. “Like, is that really…I don’t know…do we have the funds? Do we have the money? Do we have the apartment?’ Because our apartment is pet-friendly—very pet-friendly— but also, I didn’t know if they were going to take a cat that had an active flea infestation.”
They decided they could at least take him for the night, give him a flea bath, and make sure he was warm and fed. They stopped on the way home to buy towels, food, cat litter, and a makeshift litter box.
“All the employees of all the stores were so excited,” Avery says. “They’re like, ‘Did you just get a little kitty?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, we just got it from the Hy-Vee.’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s so adorable! You have to keep it. It’s the Cat Distribution System.’”
“It is,” she adds. “You can’t go against the Cat Distribution System. It works in mysterious ways.”
Welcome to the family, Juice
Even before the kitten’s second vet visit the next morning, Avery and Eric had happily accepted their fate and named him. Eric is a music teacher, and Avery majored in music composition, so a music-themed name was in order.
Avery says she has always wanted to name a cat Giuseppe Verdi and call it “Juice” for short. She just never imagined that Giuseppe “Juice” Verdi would be an orange kitten she and Eric found in a Hy-Vee parking lot. But here we are. And now they can always joke that they went to the store one day and came home with “orange Juice.”
We all know it was simply the Cat Distribution System working its magic, of course. But there’s also something magical in the way random people came together, totally impromptu, to help a tiny, helpless creature avoid a tragic fate. Kitten cuteness may take center stage in this story, but it’s also a beautiful reminder of how lovely, kind, and compassionate people can be.
Welcome to the family, Juice. You couldn’t have chosen better humans.
