Woman travels 1,600 miles to rescue a cat that she doesn't want. Just in time for Caturday!

A devoted animal lover told yesterday how she travelled 1,600 miles to rescue a stray cat in France - after it became trapped on a roof.  Wendy Wilson, 65, adopted tortoiseshell tabby cat Sandy while living for 16 weeks a year at her holiday home in Cruzy, Herault, in the South of France.  But the mischievous moggy sparked a cross-channel rescue after getting stuck on a neighbour's garage roof without food or water for three weeks.

Hours after learning of Sandy's plight Wendy took a £150 Ryanair flight from Stansted Airport to Carcassonne to rescue the stricken cat.  The retired mum-of-two found Sandy crying out for help and almost starving to death after climbing up inside a neighbour's garage and onto the roof.  After the rescue, she booked Sandy onto a coach to drive her all the her back home to her home in Woodbridge, Suffolk.

Wendy, a retired building society worker, said: "My French neighbour told me Sandy had disappeared and when I made enquiries I found she was stuck on a roof.  The only way off the roof was back down through the garage or a 10 foot drop.  She was too nervous to wait by the garage door and lots of people had tried to coax her down. But they weren't particularly bothered about feeding her.  The poor old thing was stuck up there in the baking heat for three weeks without any real food or water. How she survived I just don't know.

I was so worried about it I decided to fly out to France. I just thought I have to go get her. I thought she was going to die.  You can't call the French firefighters like you do in England because they wouldn't appreciate going out to rescue a cat."

"When I got there I saw her on the roof and she ran over and cried out but there was no way to get to her.  I had to wait until the neighbours got back so I could get into their garage.  She was so thirsty and really hungry. She wouldn't have lasted much longer. It was definitely worth it and I couldn't abandon her to die."

Inexplicably, Wendy has now donated the cat to her neighbour Peggy Ward, 83.

Cat Ranching!

An UNREAL sanctuary for cats.

This guy has saved a lot of cats. Check out the little houses he built for them.

Craig Grant bought a tree farm far away from the city and turned it into a sanctuary for all the cats he has rescued. He lives there with the cats and provides lots of love, care and companionship. It's hard to imagine that once he was not a cat lover and did not want cats until he met his son's cat Pepper. He also got to experience what it is like raising a litter of kittens.

Over that time I learned that every cat had its own unique personality and it wasnt long before the kittens were swinging from my curtains. I didn't care. Something had changed, I didn't want to give them up. The condo life was not easy for the kitties, so Craig found a tree farm and settled down there for his fur babies. Over the next several months, he rescued more and more homeless and abandoned cats. The number of new residents kept going up, so Craig expanded the sanctuary to make more room for the animals.

The farm was named Caboodle Ranch and is now a permanent home for all the homeless, rescued cats. Each of them has a sad story of their past, but now they are living in heaven. Cats should be able to roam free, and at Caboodle Ranch, tha'¹s what they do. Craig has built many beautiful cat houses and decorated the place with vibrant colors and tons of liveliness. All the cats are spayed and neutered. Don't forget to visit Caboodle Ranch (non profit rescue center) at their website and check them out on Facebook.

The Veterinarian (groaner alert)‏

'The Veterinarian'

One Sunday, in counting the money in the weekly offering, the Pastor of a small church found a pink envelope containing $1,000. It happened again the next week! The following Sunday, he watched as the offering was collected and saw an elderly woman put the distinctive pink envelope on the plate. This went on for weeks until the pastor, overcome by curiosity, approached her.

"Ma'am, I couldn't help but notice that you put $1,000 a week in the collection plate," he stated. "Why yes," she replied, "every week my son sends me money and I give some of it to the church."

The pastor replied, "That's wonderful. But $1000 is a lot, are you sure you can afford this? How much does he send you?"

The elderly woman answered, "$10,000 a week."

The pastor was amazed. "Your son is very successful; what does he do for a living?"

"He is a veterinarian," she answered.

"That's an honorable profession, but I had no idea they made that much money," the pastor said. "Where does he practice?" The woman answered proudly, "In Nevada... He has two cat houses, one in Las Vegas , and one in Reno"

At least SOMETHING good comes out of Somalia

Scar and Grumpy, lions rescued from Somali chaos

Their names are 'Scar' and 'Grumpy', and they are two irresistible lion cubs rescued from a trafficker at Mogadishu port - having become the mascots of the Somali capital's airport where they have found a temporary home.  The four-month-old lions now live in an enclosure at the end of Mogadishu international airport's tarmac and have become a rare cheerful attraction in the war-ravaged city.

They were discovered by Somali government soldiers in December, their back legs tied together and generally in bad shape, on a merchant ship which was about to smuggle them to an Arab country to be sold.  The port authority rescued the two cats and handed them over to a foreign logistics company based within the airport compound, one of the few relatively secure areas in Mogadishu and home to the African Union force's main base.

The sparkling Indian Ocean, the wreckage of a military cargo plane and barb wire horizon provide an unusual landscape for the king of animals but Scar and Grumpy spend their days like most lion cubs do: sleeping, playing and eating.  Fortunately, they have found (in a South African, already in charge of a group of sniffer dogs on the airport compound) a natural animal-loving handler.

"Unfortunately, it's not the first time that we hear about lions. Some of the foreigners working here have been offered lions to buy," the man said, speaking to an AFP reporter on condition of anonymity.  At only four months, Scar and Grumpy look like big cuddly cats but are already too powerful for humans to play with and have to be fed an entire goat every three days.  "I would rather see them running around in a big game reserve where they could hunt than living in a zoo for 25 years," the handler said.