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Joy

A Canadian shelter sells older cats like used cars, and it's pretty effective...and hilarious.

Can I interest you in a pre-owned cat?

YouTube

Used cars, er cats, for sale!


Ever walk onto a used cat lot? Yeah, you read that right.

That's right, it's a used cat lot! Except, it's not a lot, it's the Calgary Humane Society in Canada and in 2015 they came up with an excellent way to pair older kitties with new forever homes. So, why this approach?


Because in a world where around 7 million pets enter shelters and only around 4 million get out, that's a lot of sad math and a lot of good animals missing out on loving homes.

gif of mustached man showing off different cats

You name it; we got it.

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gif of different cats flashing by like an ad

All makes and models of cats.

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gif of cat nuzzling mustached man's ear

An escape attempt?

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In an attempt to out a stop to that sad math, the kind folks from the Calgary Humane Society got creative.

mustached man in suit advertising a shelter kitty

The top speed of cats...

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The fastest domestic cat running speed appears to be 29.8 mph. This salesman knows his product!

gif of mustached man in suit pantomimes cat ears in front of sign for Calgary Humane Society

Felines at the Human Society ready to go.

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They discovered some very adept cat performers.

mustached man advertises a black cat

Get yourself a pre-owned kitty.

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Call Hollywood!

They pulled out all the stops to help future cat owners realize that pre-owned cats are the way to go!

And in addition to the commercial, the cats were priced to go on a very special Saturday.

flashing cat ad

Reducing the price.

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They get it. Kittens are popular. There's no way around it. They're kittens! I used to be kitten-crazy (I was a child!), but I've adopted older cats and so have my friends. They're special. They're cute. They're soulful. And instead of adorably biting your fingers until they grow up past kittenhood, older cats chill out on your couch and teach you about relaxing.

gif of mustached man playing with a cat

The simple pleasures of cat ownership.

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Older or "pre-owned" cats are wonderful and they deserve homes too. While kittens can be fun for young families, older cats are perfect companions for everyone: kids, adults, and especially older adults who may be living alone. They're calmer, more tolerant, their personalities are fully developed, and they're just looking for a warm place to sleep and an owner to love and snuggle with. Sounds nice, doesn't it? If that doesn't convince you, though, there's always Calgary Humane's awesome commercial to further grease the wheels.

Check it out:

This article originally appeared ten years ago.

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Family

When her 5-year-old broke his leg, this mom raised $0. It's actually inspiring.

Her crowdfunding alternative is so obvious, it's shocking America hasn't taken advantage of it.

OrthoIndy

A bad injury doesn't come with a cost.

Freddie Teer is a normal boy. He loves Legos, skateboarding, and horsing around with his older brother Ollie. But in March 2017, his mother faced every parent's worst nightmare.Freddie was doing tricks down the stairs of his front porch when he fell off his bike—and his bike fell on him. "[He was] just crying, wouldn't let us touch his leg, couldn't put any weight on his leg. We knew," mom Ashley says.

Ashley rushed Freddie to the emergency room, where an X-ray confirmed the bones in his left shin were broken in half. He needed to be sedated, his bones had to be set, and he was put in a cast. It was an agonizing day for the Teers. But it's what happened next that was truly inspiring.

green and yellow bike lying in grass beside red shoesFreddie fell of his bike—and his bike fell on him. Photo via iStock

We've all seen heartwarming stories of communities coming together to raise money online to help people cover medical care costs for themselves and loved ones.

There was the Kentucky mom with stage 4 cancer whose family collected over $1 million. The New Orleans police officer whose unit banked thousands for her chemotherapy. The Colorado man who lost his legs and whose friends crowdfunded his recovery.

various headlines

Many Americans raise money and receive donations to cover healthcare costs.

Photo byMonam/Pixabay

While Freddie's injury required major treatment, none of Ashley's friends raised any money for him.

No one from their town took up a collection or held a bake sale.

No GoFundMe page was started to help cover his bills.

Instead, Ashley and Freddie walked out of the hospital owing nothing. Because they live in Canada.

"You just leave," Ashley says. "You don't pay anything."

Incredible.

Under Canada's healthcare system, people like the Teers can see their doctors and go to the hospital when they're hurt or sick, and they don't get charged.

So heartwarming.

It almost wasn't this way.

Ashley was born and raised in St. Louis in the U.S. where health care is expensive and complicated. In 2005, she fell in love with a Canadian man and moved with him to Abbotsford, British Columbia, where they and their five children will enjoy heavily subsidized, affordable health care coverage at a low premium for the remainder of their natural lives.

"We're able to go when we need help and we get help," Ashley says.

Just amazing.

As Freddie recovered, no one showed up at the Teer home with a large check or collection plate full of cash.

Instead, Ashley and her family were "supported through meals and just that kind of care"—meals they were able to enjoy without having to decide between enduring the shame of hitting up their friends for money or facing the prospect of sliding into bankruptcy.

two boys playing outside

Freddie (right) and his brother Ollie.

Photo by Ashley Teer.

The most uplifting part? Middle-income Canadians like the Teers pay taxes at roughly the same rates as Americans and still get their bones fixed for free at hospitals.

Not everything about Freddie's recovery process was smooth.

The first night, Freddie tossed and turned in severe pain, unable to sleep. Ashley, however, was able to call her family doctor—who she never has to pay since he is compensated by a public system that continues to have overwhelming public support to this day (though support has dipped slightly in recent years)—to get her son a codeine prescription. Miraculous!

Canada's public health care plan doesn't cover drugs. But, inspiringly, because of price controls, medicine is way cheaper there.

The Teers did lean on their friends and family for help while Freddie got better.

"We were kind of just asking people to pray," she explains—primarily to lift her son's spirits, and not, thankfully, to ask God to provide sufficient funds to cover basic medical care that every human living in a fair and prosperous society should have access to.

Even though he wasn't able to move around, friends and relatives eagerly invited Freddie to hang out during his recovery instead avoiding him out of guilt for not pledging enough to his GoFundMe campaign.

young boy in a cast sitting by corn stalks

Freddie with his cast in the garden.

Photo by Ashley Teer.

Just. Wow.

With support from his community, Freddie's cast came off six weeks later, right on schedule.

Healthy once more, Freddie went right back to enjoying extreme sports like BMX biking, skateboarding, and snowboarding, and Ashley is free to let him enjoy them without worrying about one fall wiping out their entire life savings and leaving her family destitute.

"Where we live, we're not stressful when things happen to our kids," Ashley says. "It's not a stressful time financially, so the whole family is not anxious."

It's peace of mind that she—and the residents of virtually every other rational, wealthy, industrialized country in the world—share.

"I feel safe, and I feel like my voice is heard," she says. "I can't imagine living in a place that I didn't feel that way."


This article originally appeared seven years ago.

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Community

A kid in Kansas released balloons with a note. A Cree man in Quebec found them 1,800 miles away.

The connection led to a beautiful cultural exchange.

Hattie Longchap/Facebook

Reid Habberts note traveled by balloon 1,800+ miles, from Kansas to Quebec.

Stories of people tossing a message in a bottle into the ocean and having it found by some stranger on a distant shore have always intrigued us. The questions of chance vs. providence in who receives the message and the possible perils that could impede it from reaching anyone at all make the whole idea intriguing. A simple story beginning—throwing a message haphazardly out to the big, wide world—can have so many endings.

When 10-year-old Reid Habbart from Manhattan, Kansas attached a note to a bunch of helium-filled balloons and sent them off into the sky, he had no idea where it would end up. He certainly didn't expect them to travel more than 1,800 miles north, to traditional First Nations lands in Quebec, where a Cree hunter would find them while out hunting geese.

"I found them on the water … about a kilometer from my camp," 51-year-old David Bertie Longchap told CBC. "I thought 'Oh what is this?'"

The way the balloons were found on the water highlights the environmental reasons not to release balloons, but thankfully this story has a happy ending.

Longchap tied the balloons to his pickup truck, and after they dried out he was able to make out the note attached to them: "Hi, my name is Reid. I'm 10-years-old and I live in Manhattan, Kansas …These are my sister's balloons. If you find these, please write me."

Longchap's sister Hattie posted about the find on her Facebook page on April 26, with photos of her brother with the balloons and the note and maps showing how far they had traveled.

Hattie connected with Reid's family through Facebook, and they were amazed at where his balloons had ended up.

"The wind was out of the north that day blowing hard," Reid's father told Hattie, according to CBC. "I figured they would end up in Texas. Not north."

Others in the Quebec Cree community have been delighted by the story, sharing comments on Hattie's Facebook posts and extending an invitation for Reid to come visit.

"That is so cool," Amanda Miansum wrote. "Tell him all of us Crees said 'Hi' back too!"

"This little guy just made so many friends in CREE NATION,💙 hope you get a chance to visit CN and where your balloon journey ended," wrote Delana Gunner-Blackned.

"Hey there Reid, you touched the Cree Nation," wrote Harriet Petawabano. "You are really popular here now, hugs and love to you ❤️❤️."

According to CBC, the Longchaps are planning to send Reid a beaded rainbow keychain in honor of their mother, Emma Trapper Longchap, who was the first of the Quebec Cree to die of COVID-19 in 2020. They will also send a photo and some information about Eeyou Istchee, the traditional Cree lands in the Quebec area.

Reid's parents shared the video of the balloon release in Kansas. You can hear his father saying, "Off to Nebraska," which is hilarious considering how much farther they went.

And in an additional bit of serendipitous coincidence, check out the truck in the video. Reid's balloons began their journey with a red pickup and ended their journey with a red pickup over 1,800 miles away.

No storyteller could have scripted it more perfectly.


This article originally appeared two years ago.

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National Geographic Documentary Films
National Geographic Documentary Films
Family

Nat Geo's 'Blink' tracks a family finding beauty while facing blindness as they travel the globe

“Let's go all in and fill their visual memory with as much beauty as we can."

via Edith Lemay/NatGeo

Mia, Leo, Colin, and Laurent Pelletier pose on top of their camper van in front of adouble rainbow while in Mongolia.

True

“Blink,” a new film by National Geographic Documentary Films shows how a family with four children, three of whom are going blind, embraces life in the face of an uncertain future. It’s a testament to the resilience of the Lemay-Pelletier family but also a reminder for all of us to seize the day because all our futures are uncertain.

Edith Lemay and Sébastien Pelletier are the parents of Mia, a 13-year-old girl, and three boys: Léo, 11, Colin, 9, and Laurent, 7. Over the last six years, they’ve learned that Mia and the two youngest boys have retinitis pigmentosa, a rare genetic disease in which the cells of the retina slowly die. As the disease progresses, the person develops “tunnel vision” that shrinks until very little vision remains.

The diagnosis devastated the parents. "The hardest part with the diagnosis was inaction. There's nothing they can do about it. There's no treatment,” Edith says in the film.

However, even though the parents couldn’t affect the progress of the disease, they could give their children’s senses an epic experience that would benefit them for a lifetime.

“We don’t know how fast it’s going to go, but we expect them to be completely blind by mid-life,” said the parents. Mia’s impairment advisor suggested they fill her visual memory with pictures from books. “I thought, I’m not going to show her an elephant in a book; I’m going to take her to see a real elephant,” Edith explains in the film. “And I’m going to fill her visual memory with the best, most beautiful images I can.”

The Pelletier family (from left): Mia, Sebastien, Colin, Edith Lemay, Laurent and Leo inKuujjuaq, Canada.via National Geographic/Katie Orlinsky

This realization led to an inspiring year-long journey across 24 countries, during which every family member experienced something on their bucket list. Mia swam with dolphins, Edith rode a hot-air balloon in Cappadocia, and Léo saw elephants on safari.

Colin realized his dream of sleeping on a moving train while Sébastien saw the historic site of Angkor Wat.

“We were focusing on sights,” explains Pelletier. “We were also focusing a lot on fauna and flora. We’ve seen incredible animals in Africa but also elsewhere. So we were really trying to make them see things that they wouldn’t have seen at home and have the most incredible experiences.”

Cameras followed the family for 76 days as they traveled to far-flung locales, including Namibia, Mongolia, Egypt, Laos, Nepal and Turkey. Along the way, the family made friends with local people and wildlife. In a heartbreaking scene, the boys wept as the family had to leave behind a dog named Bella he befriended in the mountains of Nepal.

But the film isn't just about the wonders of nature and family camaraderie. The family's trip becomes a “nightmare” when they are trapped in a cable car suspended hundreds of feet above the Ecuadorian forest for over 10 hours.

annapurna range, blink, nat geoLeo, Laurent, Edith, Colin, Mia, and Sebastien look out at the mountains in the Annapurna range.via MRC/Jean-Sébastien Francoeur

As expected, NatGeo’s cinematographers beautifully capture the family's journey, and in the case of “Blink,” this majestic vision is of even greater importance. In some of the film's quietest moments, we see the children taking in the world's wonders, from the vast White Desert in Egypt to a fearless butterfly in Nepal, with the full knowledge that their sight will fail one day.

Along the way, the family took as many pictures as possible to reinforce the memories they made on their adventure. “Maybe they’ll be able to look at the photographs and the pictures and they will bring back those stories, those memories, of the family together,” Edith says.

But the film is about more than travel adventures and the pain of grief; ultimately, it’s about family.

“By balancing [the parents’ grief] with a more innocent and joyous tale of childlike wonder and discovery, we felt we could go beyond a mere catalog of locations and capture something universal,” the directors Edmund Stenson and Daniel Roher, said in a statement. “Keeping our camera at kid-height and intimately close to the family, we aimed to immerse the audience in the observational realities of their daily life, as well as the subtle relationships between each of them. This is a film built on looks, gestures and tiny details—the very fabric of our relationships with one another.”

Ultimately, “Blink” is a great film to see with your loved ones because it’s a beautiful reminder to appreciate the wonders of our world, the gift of our senses and the beauty of family.

The film will open in over 150 theaters in the U.S. and Canada beginning Oct. 4 and will debut on National Geographic Channel and stream on Disney+ and Hulu later this year. Visit the “Blink” website for more information.

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