My name is Horațiu. I am a zootechnical engineer and I have loved animals all my life. In 2018 a kitten turned up in front of our house. I looked after it, then another one came, and another. When there were 5 or 6, I made a room for them in the shed next to the house. That is how Căsuța cu Pisici began.
In 2023 I found 11 abandoned cats on a pasture. One had been torn apart by a shepherd's dogs. I brought the others home, had them treated at the clinic and made room for them.
Today we care for 61 cats, all neutered and vaccinated. They live in three little houses with 3, 2 and 2 rooms, each room with its own pen. It is just the two of us, me and my wife, Ana. We have no volunteers and no staff. Every day we take care of food, cleaning and treatments.
Many of them have a hard story. Orbica was not born blind: she was bitten and shaken by a dog. Nicolas has a paralysed paw. Snowy is deaf. Diador had a ruptured diaphragm, then panleukopenia and FIP, and he survived all of it; now he lives in the house with us. I treated Mișu for FIP twice. He is my soft spot, the cleverest tom here.
The FIP treatments cost us more than 9,000 euro and we went into debt for them. We took that on and we did not give up. But the sanctuary is full. We turn away new cats every day, because we have nowhere left to keep them safe, and it hurts every time.
Behind the little houses we have a yard of 1,100 m². The cats cannot use it, because a cat jumps and climbs over an ordinary fence, and the fence we have now does not stop them. So they live only in rooms and in pens of 4 to 5 m².
That is why I want to rebuild the fence, about 180 metres of it, so that a cat can no longer get over it. The posts we have now were driven into the ground with a sledgehammer and they are not long enough. I need longer posts, set in concrete. When the fence is done, all 61 cats can go out onto the grass, into the sun, and play, not just in a few square metres.
I pay for everything with the association's card and I have an invoice for everything. On our website we publish our bank statements and the list of donations and expenses every month. Here I do the same: every donation appears by itself in the public ledger below, and I put a photo of the invoice next to it. Everyone who gives gets an email when the proof appears.