Our story

Where is this? Is it real?

Where. Pune and PCMC, and only online. There is no office, shelter or counter to visit. Every cat lives with the person who rescued it, in Baner, Kothrud, Viman Nagar, Kharadi, Pimple Saudagar and beyond.

Is it real. The cats are posted on Instagram, and every post carries the rescuer's own name and number, so you talk to a real person about a real cat. The quickest look at what this is: the cats looking for homes right now.

Started by a cat feeder with a bag always full of food

My bag is always full of cat food. That is how this started — feeding the community cats near home, getting close enough to a cat to catch it for a neuter or a spay, and coming back the next week to see who was still there.

Then one Diwali the kittens under a car had no mother. Four of them, about a month old, too young to last outside. So they came home with me, and once they were well I started looking for people to adopt them. I posted appeals and got almost nothing back. The established organisations were unreachable. This city has no government shelter. I started @catadoption_pune to home those four and a few others — and then strangers began asking me to post their rescues too.

That is when the real problem showed itself, and it is not a shortage of good homes. It is that there is almost nothing holding up the people doing this work. No reliable information. Nobody answering the phone. Very little written down about keeping a cat in an Indian flat, in this climate, on what is actually sold here. Every rescuer I met had taught themselves alone and assumed that was normal. Most of us simply don't know much about cats yet — I didn't.

Before Pune I fostered for the BC SPCA in Vancouver, failed at it twice and adopted the cats, and later volunteered as a kitten adoption facilitator in Toronto. I have a day job in data. This runs alongside it.

When this site says we, it means the network. The rescuers across Pune and PCMC take cats in, pay the vet bills, foster them in their own homes and hand them over themselves — they are the volunteers here. I run the board they post to, answer the DMs, and do a basic check with each rescuer before a cat is listed.

We list indies only. Most were abandoned, orphaned or born by accident, and they make just as good pets as any breed.

catadoption_pune posts cats from trusted rescuers across Pune and PCMC, after a basic check with each one. It is not an NGO. It does not run a shelter or handle urgent rescue cases. What it does is post their cats where adopters can find them, and put you in touch with the rescuer.

Adoption here is free. Not as a kindness — a cat is not a commodity, and we would rather not put a number on one. There is something we ask for instead: that a kitten is fed what it actually needs, that the vaccinations happen, and that the cat is neutered or spayed when it is old enough. That is the fee.

Money also changes the conversation. Once someone has paid, the questions a rescuer needs to ask start to feel like an obstacle instead of part of the deal — and those questions are how a cat ends up in the right home rather than merely in a home.

About 120 cats have gone home this way since May 2024. Every one of them was posted with the rescuer's own name and contact, because the person who knows the cat should be the person you talk to.

The network covers Baner, Kothrud, Viman Nagar, Pimple Saudagar, Defence Colony, Kharadi, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Bhavani Peth, Hadapsar, Vishrantwadi — and wherever else good rescuers operate.

How this is paid for

The care articles link to things I use at home with my own cats: a carrier, a litter, a floor cleaner. Some of these are affiliate links. If you buy through one, the shop pays a small commission and your price stays the same.

That pays for the domain, the tools, and some of the hours that go into the board, the DMs and the guides. It's fair pay for honest work, and I would much rather earn it this way than charge anyone for a cat. Adoption never earns: nobody pays to adopt a cat here, and nobody pays to list one.