Normally when you’re thinking of getting a cat you get to choose which one you’re going to welcome into your home, but in the case of a man named Toomey in England, a determined stray cat decided to adopt him instead.
Nicknamed Boysie, because he’s...well...a boy, Toomey was first alerted to the stray little tabby when his mom kept sending him photos of a random cat that kept showing up in her garden.
“The fact that he was staying around for so long just waiting in the garden for some food to be thrown out made us think, well, he’s probably a stray,” he explains. “He’s always been really scared of people until one day he came up to me with a really nasty cut on his neck, which he let me clean with some salt and water.”
Toomey found himself feeling gutted every time Boysie didn’t show up and noticed that his absences always seemed to coincide with bad weather, so he hatched a plan.
“I decided to get him a little something. With a little bit of DIY, we built him this hutch that he can sleep inside of. So I made it nice and comfortable and left it in his favorite spot outside the back door. I set up the camera to see if he’d be using it overnight and although he came along at 5am to give it a bit of a sniff, he ultimately decided that sleeping on the outside sofa would be better.”
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Boysie’s avoidance of the hutch went on for several weeks, something Toomey chalked up to the good weather they’d been having. But being England, it wasn’t long before the dark clouds rolled in again and Boysie was forced to reconsider his sleeping arrangements.
“One day we got torrential rain, so I snuck outside to take a look,” Toomey explains with amusement “and sure enough, there’s Boysie tucked up nice and safe in his new home.”
While Boysie was clearly determined to call Casa Toomey his forever home, it took him a while before he felt confident enough to set foot inside the house. “Once we got him neutered, he slowly began spending more time in the house and one day he even curled up on my lap and started purring for the first time,” Toomey says.
Finally, after weeks of dipping his paws in and out of the house to test the waters, Boysie settled and realized he had found his forever family. “He got more and more confident when staying indoors and even started to explore further into the house until he found his new favorite sleeping spot right where I normally sleep,” explains Toomey with a laugh.
For a cat that was once scared to be around people, Toomey says he now hates being left alone. “If I leave the room for too long, Boysie will come and stare at me until I return so he can go safely back to sleep.”
While Boysie wasn’t microchipped when he entered Toomey’s life and he has no idea what his past story is or how long he’d been living in the streets for, he’s clear about one thing: “Boysie is no longer a stray, he’s officially become part of our family.”
