Many of you already know some of this, but for those who haven’t followed our story from the beginning, or who are new to our rescue page, here’s what’s been happening in our lives.

After living for 10+ years in The Netherlands and rescuing hundreds of cats and kittens around the world, Nic and I were faced with a family emergency and had to relocate to Uruguay. We packed our bags, our cats and dogs, and took a flight across the world to what is now our new home.

Unfortunately Uruguay is filled with cats and kittens in need, but rescuing is very expensive. Veterinary care, treatments, tests, food, vaccinations and everything needed to bring a kitten back to health can quickly add up, and here, we would often be expected to cover 100% of the veterinary costs ourselves, and give them for free, and as much as we would love to be able to do that, it simply isn’t sustainable in time… PLUS ( and this is actually made us not to rescue here anymore) isn that we couldn’t find enough adopters who were willing to give them the quality of life, time and safe home we were looking for our rescues to have. I guess we set the bar too high in The Netherlands. ❤

The three times we rescued here, we ended up with cats that needed us immediately. One time, it was a box tossed in the trash containing four newborn kittens and two older ones of around three months old. I bottle-fed the babies and brought all of them back to health, but when they were ready to leave the nest, adopters were nowhere to be found. Then, completely out of the blue, a kind soul living in London reached out and said she was looking forward to adopting through us. We took a leap of faith and decided that the quality of life a kitten would have with her was our priority. So we changed our flight to The Netherlands (Nic still travels back home for work a couple of times a year) and Cash went to an amazing new home across the pond. And because we wanted the rest of the siblings to have the same fate, we decided to take two more with us and, at the last minute, we also found a wonderful home for Willa & Suki, together in Den Helder. Mar, the last of the litter, unfortunately didn’t fit in the carrier, so she stayed with us… and eventually became part of our family. 

The other two cats we rescued also ended up staying with us because we couldn’t find the right adopters for them and we were not flying to NL at that time.

But we can’t keep adding more and more cats to our furry family…and we also don’t want that to mean we have to stop rescuing.

So we’ve been trying to find a way to continue helping without compromising on what we believe every rescue cat deserves.

Our goal now is that whenever Nic travels to The Netherlands for work, I arrange the rescues with my cat-lady friends, many of whom run cat shelters and feed cat colonies. Together, we take on the cases that are struggling to find the right homes in Spain.

I take care of all the paperwork with a local vet like I always did, make sure the cats complete their health protocols, vaccinations and tests, chips and passports and arrange everything with our trusted transport company, who drives them safely to The Netherlands.

Once they arrive, Nic brings them to our home in Heemstede, where they stay with him until their adopters are ready to pick them up.

It’s definitely more complicated than rescuing and adopting locally, but it gives us a way to keep helping cats who desperately need us, while making sure we can continue giving them the kind of future we believe they deserve.

And honestly, that’s what we’ve always wanted: to keep rescuing without ever having to compromise on their quality of life or safety.