Finland

Hey everybody,

We're foreigners here in Finland and we seem to be having a really difficult time finding a cat to share our lives with here.

Here's our problem:

In all the countries we've lived in, we pretty much always adopted strays from the street. Typically the cat walked inside in the summer or meowed at our back door, we gave it some food, it spent the night, and then of course we bonded with the cat and it stayed for years with us, going freely in and out of the house and doing cat things outside when it wasn't inside cuddling with us.

Either that, or we rescued a cat from the local shelter days or hours before it was due to be put down. Again, for some reason, we instantly bonded with the cat.

Since we moved to Finland 7 years ago, we've tried adopting a cat from a local shelter - to no avail.

Problem #1: there are no strays in Finland, because cats aren't legally allowed out. No cats out, no strays, no shelters.

Problem #2: because there are no strays here, cats are in short supply. And I'm saying this literally: the few shelters operating in my area told me cats come in and go within half an hour - and for top dollar too. They're not cheap! Even common grey striped cats you can find a dime a dozen in any other country's shelters.

So we turned to the commercial market. We bought a cat 2 or 3 years ago from a student who said she didn't have time to take care of the cat. Turned out, after spending a week with the cat, it was mental. We had to give it away because it was destroying the house.

2 months ago, we decided to try it again. We're now in a large property with a lot of space. I built a large fenced-off area for the cat to play outside legally. We bought a cat the previous owner said she "had an allergy" to and had to give it up.

Allergy my hiney... This cat is mental too. That's why the owner gave it away: the cat is nice enough, but it has so much energy it too tears the house apart. I'm not kidding: it runs around the house so much it managed to scratch half the wooden floor just by bolting repeatedly when it gets the crazies in its head.

We're loving cat people, but there's nothing we can do to calm it the hell down. So we're going to give it away too before it makes us insane. We had it sterilized, vaccinated, chipped.. the whole nine yards. But it's just a 24/7 tornado. We have to.

The more we look at cats on Tori, the more we can read between the lines now: all the cats listed there are sold because the current owners can't live with their cats either. They're all mental. The cats that aren't mental don't wind up on Tori.

So here's my proposal: if you have a cat you genuinely need to give away or sell for actual genuine reasons other than because the cat has behavioral problems, we would like to take your cat for a couple of weeks with us. If the cat is nice and friendly as you claim, we'll pay you triple what you ask for. If it isn't and you just want to pass the problem to someone else, we return the cat to you. All by contract of course, so neither you or we get shafted.

We're in the Oulu region.