Not a pleasant story, but certainly ends pleasantly enough

I recall once joining my sister as she visited this one person who owned a field and like tons of animals, and at the time I wasn’t paying the sharpest attention, but I remember the owner of the cat she was buying was trying to brush this Persian cat’s fur; I remember the cat was shockingly wild and vicious, and thinking ‘Ah man, and I’m going to be in the same car as this damn thing’. My sister yelled at the guy to stop and to just hand her the cat, so he did; I didn’t know at the time why she was being so rude to the guy.

When we got in the car and drove off, with the cat in the backseat, I remember the cat calmly just hops between us and then sits in my lap with no fuss, or any kind of hissiness whatsoever. Absolutely calmest cat I’d ever seen.

My sister then told me the owner was extremely abusive towards this cat; for one thing he’d had the cat declawed (which at the time I didn’t see the issue with, but then I found out that claws are basically like fingers to cats), and he’d stuck the cat in a cage between two very angry dog cages, and that cage in that place was its life for who knows how long. My older sister is very friendly but she gets a visceral reaction towards animal abusers (I still remember when we went to a horse jumping show, she nearly jumped out of the stadium to throttle a jockey who got angry at his horse and slapped it).

The cat was shockingly calm at home, and didn’t seem to have any interest in hunting either; my other two siblings were very young at the time and were very heavyhanded/harsh/don’t know their own strength pet fans (tight hugs, very heavy petting, that kind of thing); they loved the cat to bits but the cat didn’t like them, but the cat never showed any aggression towards them in the slightest, only fleeing and hiding when it had the chance. I never saw the viciousness in that cat like I had when it was with its former owner. If I didn’t know what trauma in animals looks like, this cat was 100% the clearest show of it.

Ultimately its life at our home was obviously a much better situation for it; it eventually got dementia and died a fair number of years back but at least it was with a family that mostly liked it (I am not a pet person in the slightest; I like animals, but not in my own house).

It’s an old story but I thought I’d share it because I’ve always considered my older sister to be a really awesome person and I thought perhaps folks here might appreciate the story.