The Cat Whisperer: Maria Rusert

Maria Rusert fosters cats for San Antonio Pets Alive! (SAPA), and she says she likes “having more cats than anyone really should.” It’s okay, she adds, because she gets to adopt them out. The Cat Whisperer, her video as SAPA’s Cat Foster of the Year, is about the cats with special needs she takes in.

SAPA’s adoption center makes it easier when the cats are ready to go, she says, and its medical center means support without waiting for funding. Working out each cat’s specific issues is a lot of work, but “they learn to accommodate themselves as we learn to accommodate them.”

If you’re interested in fostering, she thinks, “you don’t need a lot of space”: one of her bathrooms can easily house a litter of kittens. Her special needs cats, she says, just need someone with them every 12 hours, and there’s always a type of animal that fits someone’s needs and restrictions.

Sylvester loved to be outside, and she really, really loved him. But with all her other fosters, he needed more attention than she could give. Someone who’d already adopted one of her special needs cats took him too. By the time we filmed, he was following his dad around the garden and climbing into a camping chair by the campfire at night. “He’s just living his best life,” she says.