Photograph by Whitney Curtis
Mouse is a cat. She’s tiny and gray like her namesake, with a wide stance and a tipsy walk, the result of cerebellar hypoplasia, a nervous-system disorder she developed in utero, when her pregnant mother caught distemper. Though Mouse wobbles and sometimes bonks into a wall while she’s playing, she has no clue there’s anything wrong with her.
“Mouse is definitely kind of a quintessential Tenth Life cat,” says director Elizabeth Frick, who laughs as Mouse reaches through a shelf to bop Gucci, a kitten rescued from a feral colony, on the head. Frick is fostering both cats, along with Tasha, a 3-year-old tortie, who, as the undisputed alpha cat, looks on at the fracas from a cool distance.
Three years ago, Frick founded Tenth Life Cat Rescue, which provides intense medical care for stray and homeless cats that can be cost-prohibitive to other shelters and rescue organizations. The first year, Tenth Life worked with a handful of cats; last year, it found homes for 120. It’s hoping to expand that to 200 in 2012. Currently, Tenth Life’s cats are housed with a network of foster families. Adopters—often found through Facebook or Twitter—fill out an application. Tenth Life talks to the adopter’s vet and conducts a phone interview with the adopter before the first visit takes place in the foster home.
Before moving here in 2006, Frick worked for Chicago’s Tree House Humane Society, which Tenth Life is based on, and eventually she’d like to follow its shelter model, too. “It’s basically a Victorian home, but made to house cats,” she explains. “That’s what I hope to create here—a home where the cats are that’s also a shelter, to create a destination for people to want to see the big house full of cats!”
Tenth Life closed on a building in Fox Park in March, which Frick hopes to open in 2013. In addition to being a shelter, Tenth Life plans to offer educational programming and low-cost spaying/neutering. In the meantime, the organization does adoption events, including a “standing gig” at the PetSmart in South City (4621 Chippewa) on the first Saturday of the month. And in April, it was set to launch a free hotline (314-808-2454) staffed by trained behavior counselors.
Just for financial reasons, cats with medical problems are often euthanized; Tenth Life operates under the assumption that every cat can find its perfect home, whether it’s a normal stray, blind, elderly, sick, or, like Chester, one of their first adoptees, missing a limb.
“The family that adopted him has a three-legged dog, and the husband is missing an arm, so they have this little missing limb connection,” Frick says. “And they kind of laughed about it—‘We have a thing for missing limbs!’—and we’re like ‘Great!’ It was very lovable.”
For more information, call 314-808-2454 or go to tenthlifecats.org.
