by Team WellJoy
Back in the early 2010s, Sarah and Dave didn’t know each other, and they had no idea that their future cat families were set to collide. Dave was living in a chaotic Brooklyn warehouse with 12 other roommates, and Sarah was in Queens.
But while they were in different boroughs of the city, both of them were (unknowingly) on the path to becoming Pet Loyalists.
One evening, Dave and his housemates spotted a flyer that their next-door neighbors had pasted up: “Looking for a home: two kittens left from a recent litter”. They jumped on the chance and Pete and Huck moved in. And despite the entire apartment fighting for the kittens’ attention, the cats decided Dave was the chosen one.
“I lived in the second story of a lofted bedroom, and the second night I woke up to the sound of scratching,” he remembers. “I looked down, and Peter was climbing up the ladder into my room. I pulled him up and he spent the whole night sleeping in bed with me. I remember thinking: these are going to be my cats.”
A few years later, Sarah also found herself being chosen by a pet in need of a Pet Loyalist. She was hanging out on the front steps of her apartment when a tiny cat - later to be named Henny - approached and adopted her. “My roommates were like, ‘let’s take her in, let’s feed her. Oh we have a cat now’,” she remembers.
An Instant Family
Their cats accompanied both of them through apartment moves and job changes, until Sarah and Dave met in 2013. In true Cat Loyalist fashion they started talking about their pets on the drive home from the bar and quickly bonded, swapping photos and debating who was cutest.
“From the beginning, it was more than us two meeting,” says Dave. “We were always thinking: how do we get our cats together? It was like the Brady Bunch – we already have these families, how do we combine them?
“From the very beginning, our cats were the focal point. It was this group that we got to be part of right away. And we’ve grown together so much.”
The pair (and their cats) have now been together for 13 years, and Dave and Sarah joke that at one point they were actually outnumbered by their pets – although sadly Henny passed away in 2022.
“She was from the streets and she always had a lot of health problems in her life,” says Sarah. “When she died Peter and Huck mourned her, and that was very sad but also very beautiful.”
“When she passed away, we reflected a lot,” adds Dave. “We were like, my gosh, look at all these eras of our time together.
“The world has changed so much, we’ve changed so much, our lives have changed so much. They’ve been this constant. I’ve spent every day with these cats, besides some very short trips, and we can look back ten years ago, and they were there.”
Lessons Learned from Cats
It’s not just the passing of time, either. Sarah says being adopted by a pet, as they both were, has changed their minds about cats. Yes, they’re stubborn and like their own way – Huck clambers over the two of them every single night to claim his sleeping spot in the middle – but she says they’re also surprisingly adaptable.
“You can pour the energy into them, and you can trust them to figure it out,” she says. “They’ve lived in so many apartments and they’ve always been great. I clicker trained them when they were ten years old. I taught them to sit.”
And while Sarah was patiently teaching the cats to sit, they were teaching Sarah and Dave a few things too.
“They’ve definitely given me a sense of what companionship really means to me,” says Dave. “Just in how much they’ve meant to me by being in our lives, by being there for us, and by simply being themselves.”
“They sleep in the bed with us every night, and they’ve been doing this for 13 years for me and 16 for Dave,” adds Sarah. “They really are our everything. They’re our family, our friends and our bosses.”