Tara
Date of Birth: 01/08/2017
Gender: Female
Gotcha Day: 01/06/2018
Breed: European Cat
There was a woman in her 80s living in the nearby village of Queyssac who used to feed 20 local wild cats. Sadly she died leaving no-one to care for them. The mayor’s solution was to poison them so when Ariane found out about this she went many times over 2 months to try and trap the cats, one after the other until they were all caught. They were neutered and socialised and we found new homes for them. Only three of them, Narnia, Hades and Tara stayed at Mudita.
Tara was caught the same day as Hades. Both of them were truly wild, we couldn’t touch them at all.
When we went to sterilise Tara the vet told us that they had to abort 6 kittens. She was only 10 months old but she was already pregnant. Out of those twenty cats there was a kitten and another young cat whom Tara allowed to suckle her as she already had milk. She hadn’t had kittens before and these two young ones weren’t related either but they got her milk.
Tara was put in the (chicken-free) coop with Hades since they were caught together. From day one she was meowing because she wasn’t happy there. Ariane then took her inside the house in a separate room to which no other cats had access and Tara very quickly turned into a house cat. It was very interesting to see how some cats take a lot longer to socialise but with Tara it happened almost instantly.
Ariane did multiple trips to bring cats to foster families and although Tara was supposed to be put for adoption, Ariane never took her. She kept her because Tara is a cat who loves to be outside and if she were adopted she would have had to be indoors all the time.
Tara is absolutely loving and gentle with humans, the only issue was that she didn’t get on so well with half of the resident cats. She lived in the dining room and always slept in her cat hammock attached to the radiator. All of this changed when she got really sick in early 2020 and we isolated her in her own room where Ariane slept for the first few nights to make sure she made it through the night. Once she got better, somehow, the problems that previously existed between her and some of the other resident cats seemed to have vanished. She now sleeps in Ariane’s room with a lot of others and the dining room is now just a corridor on her way to the outside.
She loves going outside and only comes inside when it’s bad weather or nighttime.
It is extremely important to have cats spayed and neutered to prevent the unwanted and unnecessary birth of thousands of cats. A cat goes in heat at 5 months of age and can have 2 litters per year which is up to 12 kittens each year. After two years that means 67 cats, after 5 years it’s more than 11 000. Most of them end up being killed.