Very pleased to meet you. My name is Ruby and I’m less than a year old. I’m looking for a forever home please, as I haven’t been dealt a particularly great hand in the great poker game of life so far, and it would be nice to get a few aces rather than a bunch of two and threes.

My tiny kittens and I were surviving as best we could in a back garden, and to be honest it wasn’t going at all well. I wasn’t born feral - I had a home sometime in my past – and I tried my best. I really did. But I just didn’t have the street-smarts to cope with life outside and we were all starving, flea bitten and having a generally awful time.

Luckily, someone spotted us, trapped us all and got us somewhere safe and warm.

But I was broken.

I rejected my kittens almost immediately, and although the lovely humans tried incredibly hard to encourage me to look after them, I just couldn’t bear to do it anymore. As they were in such a poor state they had to go to a separate home quite quickly to give them a fighting chance. One sadly crossed the bridge, but the others are doing ok now, so that’s at least something.  

Currently, I’m on my own in a comfortable foster home, which is so much better than trying to cope in a garden, and my physical condition has massively improved. However, my experience has obviously had an effect on me. I’ve found my safe space on the windowsill, but if anyone comes near me I get flash-backs and start hissing loudly. I don’t actually mean it though – it’s just an automatic response. If you ignore the lightning show and give me pets, the storm in my head subsides, I lean into it and I purr like a sports-car.

So…you know the chapters of my life so far. Can you help me write the next, hopefully happier, ones? I won’t lie – it’s going to take some work to erase the mental scars left by my time on the streets, so I need a family who can be patient with me until I get over it. That does rule out small humans, at least in the short term, and probably dogs too, unless they are very calm. I might be ok with other cats but the race to get me to bond is going to be more of a marathon than a sprit. Maybe a half-marathon with the right cat. 

Could you be that family? I’d love a second chance at a normal home life with people to love, and who would love me again.