Tuna Waited Two Years. Then Someone Stopped Scrolling.

Tuna doesn't have a tail.

That's the first thing anyone notices, and for two years at Kitty Bungalow, it was also the last thing a lot of people noticed. Because the missing tail comes with a consequence: some incontinence he'll live with for the rest of his life. It's manageable — a routine, some cleanup, nothing that requires a medical degree or a heroic disposition. But it's the kind of line in an adoption profile that makes a scrolling finger keep scrolling.

So he waited. Two years is a long time in a cat's life. Long enough to watch a lot of other cats leave.

Meanwhile, Sydney was having a hard year.

She's 25. She'd built her whole working life around animals — first as a wildlife rehabilitator, then as a vet assistant at a general practice animal hospital. Then a chronic illness meant she had to stop working. Around the same time, a beloved pet bird died. She went from spending every single day surrounded by animals to spending most days alone in her home, and she noticed the shape of that absence almost immediately.

"I realized how lonely I was," she told me, "no longer spending time around affectionate animals."

So she decided to adopt a cat. And she decided, specifically, to adopt a disabled one.

She wasn't even settled yet. She and her boyfriend were preparing to move in together and relocate to LA County, and they hadn't secured an apartment lease. But she'd started looking at LA rescues anyway, found Kitty Bungalow, and started scrolling their available cats.

Then she hit Tuna's profile, and that was that.

"Something about Tuna really resonated with me personally because I know what it is like to be underestimated and overlooked because of a disability, and seeing how he had been waiting 2 years already to find a forever home really broke my heart."

Months passed. They found the apartment, moved, unpacked, settled in enough to feel ready. And then they drove to Kitty Bungalow to pick Tuna up for a trial visit.

She knew instantly.

What's happened since

Tuna has been home a short while now, and Sydney spends about 90% of her time with him — which, given that her health keeps her home most days, means the two of them are essentially inseparable. She's 25, and her life looks pretty different from most people's at 25. Tuna has slotted into that life like he was cut to fit it.

Here's the part that got me, though. Sydney says Tuna's presence is teaching her about caring for herself. Not just about caring for him — about herself. There's something in the daily work of tending gently to a body that needs a little extra help that turns out to be good practice for tending gently to your own.

And then she wrote this, which I've thought about every day since:

"I feel like I have known Tuna for my whole life, and I feel like I was meant to adopt him."

Why we do this

I want to be clear about something, because it matters.

Special Souls didn't find Tuna his home. Sydney did that. She went looking for exactly him, for reasons that were entirely her own, and she would have kept looking until she found him.

What we do is smaller and, I think, more important than it sounds: we make sure that when the right person finally shows up, the money isn't what stops them. A cat with lifelong medical needs means lifelong costs, and those costs are the reason good, loving, capable people talk themselves out of an adoption they genuinely want. We remove that. That's the whole model. When one of our sponsored cats gets adopted, Special Souls financially supports the adopter — so the decision can be about the cat, and only the cat.

Two years, Tuna waited. Not because nobody would have loved him. Because the people who would have loved him kept scrolling past a line about incontinence.

Somewhere out there right now is another cat with another line in his profile, and another person who hasn't found him yet. That's the gap we stand in.

Go follow him

Sydney has generously said we can share Tuna anytime, and she's given him his own Instagram, which is called @mildlyspicytuna.

Go follow the boy. He waited two years for an audience. 🧡