When Paul Russell had to put his 82-year-old relative in a nursing home, he was sad but he knew it was for the best as the elderly man was suffering from Alzheimer’s and no longer recognized any of his family members. As if it wasn’t hard enough for Paul to put him in a nursing home, he had to tell his uncle that he couldn’t take his beloved 17-year-old-cat, Siam along with him.
Being the animal lovers that they are, Paul and his wife agreed to take care of Siam.
But, when they went to his uncle’s house to check in on the cat, they were shocked by what they saw. Upon entering, Siam was nowhere in site and Paul realized that his uncle had been hoarding items as the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania house was filled with boxes and there were scratch marks all over the walls.
Paul finally found Siam. He was in the bathtub tucked away behind a cluster of boxes and he looked like he hadn’t eaten in days. But, then Paul heard a growl from the cellar across the hall. He assumed that maybe it was a raccoon that had somehow snuck into the basement.
“I started searching around, and suddenly this huge creature darts out from under the bed and runs down to the cellar, and I thought, ‘What was that? At first, I thought it was a cat that had a blanket on top of it,” Paul recalled.
Paul took a break from the overwhelming house, went home and then returned the next day, this time well-equipped.
“The next day, I went into the creepy old cellar… I’m down there with a flashlight looking — it was almost like a horror movie. And I found her hunkering in the corner. I thought, ‘My god this IS a cat.’”
What Paul saw was a cat that hat mats that were so long that he looked like some type of wild creature with furry tentacles hanging from its body.
Luckily Paul did the right thing and contacted the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society, but even they were shocked and admitted they had never seen anything like this.
“Hidey was really overweight, so that makes it harder for cats to groom themselves, and that’s when you see matting happen,” Western PA Humane Society Senior Marketing Communications Manager Caitlin Lasky said. “They hadn’t seen anything like that. Even looking online, I had a hard time finding anything similar, so it’s definitely a unique case.”
The team at the hospital had to take caution when it came to removing the mats and they knew that they couldn’t afford to make any mistakes.
After putting Hidey under general anesthesia, they began carefully cutting away at the mass of overgrown hair.
“Our Medical team shaved off the pounds of intertwined fur from her body and, needless to say, this cat is feeling so much better now!” read the the shelter’s Facebook post. “The fur had accumulated up to two pounds in weight! Lots of fur. It had to be years of matting for it to get that long.”
It turns out that Hidey was not only the hairiest cat in history but also one of the fattest. And now Hidey had an even bigger problem: she had no place to call home.
