"Someone in my Facebook newsfeed had shared a picture of a cat in a tank a while back," Garry revealed. The idea had been stuck in his head for a while and he was planning to build a tank for his cat once he had the time. It took him around 3 hours to craft "at a leisurely pace" and Garry pointed out that his cat loves boxes and cardboard.
Garry told us that his cat is a 2-year-old female named Mittens. "She is mostly calm and collected, apart from when we all go to bed, then she runs about the house like a maniac," he told Bored Panda. "She also takes a toy to the top of the stairs around 1 AM every night and howls which is both annoying and cute."
We also wanted to know how the quarantine has affected Garry and his family. "I work from home anyway as a graphic designer, my wife is a carer with a Scottish charity, so it’s business as usual for us. We do have two kids around all day every day, but they’re pretty good at amusing themselves and can video chat with their friends. Overall, we can’t complain, others aren’t so lucky."
The British Veterinary Association (BVA) recommends that pet owners keep their cats indoors to prevent the spread of the virus, especially if someone in the household shows symptoms of Covid-19. However, the president of the BVA Daniella Dos Santos told the BBC that all pet owners should “practice good hygiene” because “an animal’s fur could carry the virus for a time” if the pet came into contact with someone who’s ill.
Even if you’re not building cardboard tanks for your cat, there are other ways to keep it happy and feeling meowsome. USA Today writes that it’s very important that your pet eats well during the lockdown, so make sure you’re stocked up with cat food and snacks.
But food isn’t everything—your cat needs to have fun, too! If you don’t have any cat toys, give it some empty cardboard boxes to play with. You never know, it could be the first step on your journey to build your cat its very own tank and make it feel like a meowrine!
Apart from awesome crafting activities, the quarantine has had another positive result: animal adoptions are way up in the US. Vox reports that animal shelters all over the US were overwhelmed with applications to adopt cats (and doggos, too).
“We put a call out for fosters on March 13, when everything kind of was really starting to hit full steam,” Katy Hansen, communications director for the Animal Care Centers of New York City, told Vox. “All we knew was that we needed to get as many animals out as possible because we didn’t know how this would affect our staff. We thought we would get 50 applications. We got 5,000.”
Hansen expected the opposite; she thought that people would leave their animals at shelters instead of adopting them. Meanwhile, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals saw a 500 percent increase in applications to foster pets in New York and Los Angeles since March 15.
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