Happy Tail: Viñales (formerly Smokey)
There are always heaps of good reasons for going on holiday. Here is another, perhaps unanticipated one: a chance encounter could dramatically change the way you feel about a certain species. Just ask Jeong and Nik, two-legged parents to devilishly handsome, long-haired grey boy Viñales, formerly Smokey.
“Jeong and I were on holiday in Viñales, Cuba in February 2020, right before Covid lockdowns,” Nik explains. “She never really wanted cats, but we were on a tour of a cigar farm, and when Jeong sat down to listen to one of the speeches, a little barn kitten jumped in her lap and fell asleep there for 30 minutes.
“Jeong decided she really did like cats —I have always liked cats — so we decided to adopt one, and when we did, we named him Viñales because of that.”
While the decision to adopt was easy, the logistics of doing so were not. For one thing, the couple were living with roommates at the time. Once that hurdle was cleared, another arose: the pandemic, which meant that Jeong and Nik would have to “meet” with Smokey and his foster mom Robin over Zoom rather than in person.
Even so, Nik says, “Dealing with ACR was fantastic, and the fact that they would take him back if it didn’t work out for whatever reason was comforting. We didn’t want to do that, but having that flexibility made us thankful.”
Fate was clearly in Smokey/Viñales’ corner anyway. As the story goes, the cat had suddenly turned up at a west end ACR colony and was trapped, neutered, and released. However, his colony caretaker noticed that he seemed too friendly to be a garden variety stray. She suspected he’d been a housecat that had either gotten lost or been dumped.
So, Smokey — by then looking a bit worse for wear — was re-trapped, placed with an ACR assessment home, then with a foster home and finally, adopted by Jeong and Nik in June 2021.
“We saw Smokey on the website, and he looked so big and funny. I’ve always liked long-haired cats,” Nik recalls, adding that the couple found ACR and their cat’s profile by coincidence. “We knew we wanted to bring home a rescue cat, so we Googled ‘cat rescue’ and the area we were living in, which happened to be the Annex at the time.”
These days, the five-year-old fluffball Nik describes as “goofy and energetic” is living his best life in B.C. “He’s very affectionate and sleeps with us almost every night, cuddles with us. And he is playful. He still has that hunter spirit in him.
“I’m happy we were able to help a cat that needed a home,” Nik says. “And Viñales seems even happier here in Vancouver. Our apartment is bigger, and it has more windows.”
-Kim Hughes
