The Best Friends Feline Finishing School has been working wonders. It’s a shame more colleges aren’t run this way! One of the four yurts dedicated to the cats who were rescued from Pahrump, Nevada, in the Great Kitty Rescue has become a mini university for socialization. And school has never been so fun.

Catch up on all the latrest stories at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in the Sanctuary Stories section of the Best Friends News.

Here’s the way the whole thing works. At the beginning of the process, you have a room set aside as the classroom. Picture this group as a whole bunch of freshmen just starting out: Nervous. Trying to find their lockers. That’s a little bit (or a lot) how these cats feel.

The classroom is where the cats learn the most basic social skills. Instead of English 101, the caregivers teach the cats stuff like learning to trust people and learning not to hide in the back of the cages. And for some of these cats who were once severely neglected, that’s a big deal.

After the classroom comes the playroom. Here, the sophomores have a whole new universe at their disposal. No cages. Nowhere to hide. The playroom is a big open space where volunteers and staffers can sit with the cats and hold them for petting sessions. For many of the cats, that’s truly a new experience. Yet with nowhere to duck out of sight, they adjust. A lot faster than you might think, in some cases.

Some cats go from super shy to resting comfortably in laps within weeks. Even so, they’re only about halfway through the program at this point.

Next comes the real-life room. Like a true junior year in college, the cats must begin dealing with real-life experiences. This is a room set up in the yurts to represent a home environment. The room has everything from furniture to floor lamps to pictures hanging on the walls. Unlike the first two rooms, the real-life room has places to hide, just as there would be in a home setting. However, the cats can’t move on to the next phase until they stop trying to hide in the real-life room. Only after they’ve passed their finals, so to speak, do they get to move on up to the big leagues. The senior year!

The last phase in this one-of-a-kind college is sleepovers. There are several trailers near the yurts where staff members, and soon volunteers, can take the cats for sleepovers in a home environment. This is the real deal here, not simulation. The cats come face to face with microwaves, beds, running water – the works.

In fact, by the time the cats graduate from feline finishing school and find a family, a real home is going to be somewhat anticlimactic. Which is a perfectly glorious scenario. Instead of freaking out and darting under the nearest bed the first day in their new home, these cats will arch an eyebrow and say something like, "Oh. You have one of those bed thingies, too. Got anything to eat?" Now that’s some quality education!

Story by David Dickson
Photos by Sarah Ause

---