Читать книгу Cats For Dummies - Gina Spadafori - Страница 53

So what about that litter of kittens a coworker or neighbor is offering up for free? You have no real reason not to consider them if they meet your requirements and they’re healthy and well socialized.

Those are pretty big “ifs,” however. Take a kitten from a “free-to-a-good-home” source and you may end up with more problems than you imagined. If the kitten turns up positive for feline leukemia or a treatable health problem, do you have any recourse against the person from whom you got the kitten? Hardly. The chances are high the mother was never tested for disease and the father was unknown.

Consider such a litter if you want; many people have done just fine by adopting from such a source. But make sure that your kitten is healthy and socialized and try as best as you can to suggest that your pet and her littermates be the very last that the mother cat produces.

Adult cats are a slightly different matter. They’re offered up for a lot of different reasons, some because of behavior issues that can be fixed, and others as unavoidable as the death of an owner or the development of a child’s life-threatening allergy to cats. Many of these displaced kitties are wonderful pets, and you have no reason not to adopt one, as long as you make sure that the cat is healthy and isn’t being placed for a behavior problem you’re not prepared to address. To be fair, many of those problems are very fixable, but you need to know what you’re dealing with before you adopt.