Last Updated on May 29, 2026 by admin
Forty-three cats came out of one Manitoba house. The first one to step out of the carrier was a four-year-old tabby-and-white with a short bobbed tail they are calling Pretzel.
The house is in Treherne, a town of about six hundred and fifty people about ninety minutes southwest of Winnipeg. Cat Rescue Manitoba received the call on a Tuesday afternoon from an RCMP detachment officer doing a wellness check on an elderly homeowner who had not been seen at his usual coffee stop in three weeks. The homeowner is eighty-four. He is being cared for at a long-term facility in Carman. He has been, the rescue’s director Yvonne Chartrand says, calm and gracious throughout the process of signing over his cats. He has asked, three times, about Pretzel specifically.
Pretzel was his.
The other forty-two were also his, in the technical sense of having been fed by him for some span of time ranging from a week to ten years. None of the forty-two were named except Pretzel. Pretzel had been with the homeowner since 2022, when she had been left as a six-week-old kitten in a Tim Hortons parking lot in Carman with a sister and three brothers. The homeowner had taken all five. The other four had, over the intervening three years, either died or vanished into the broader cat ecosystem of the farmhouse. Pretzel had stayed in the kitchen.
She was, the homeowner told Yvonne, in the kind of voice that men of a certain age use when they are trying not to cry in front of a stranger: the inside cat. The one I used to talk to.
Cat Rescue Manitoba is small. It has, on paper, three full-time staff and one part-time vet tech. It runs out of a converted hair salon on Selkirk Avenue in Winnipeg. It cannot, on a normal week, hold forty-three cats. It is, this week, holding forty-three cats by virtue of a foster network Yvonne built by calling fourteen separate Manitoba rescuers between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. Three were able to take cats immediately. Eight more were able to take cats by Friday. The remaining cats — eleven of them, mostly the friendlier short-haired adults — are currently in the converted hair salon, sleeping in stacked crates and on the styling chairs, which have been covered in fleece blankets donated by a community quilting circle in Steinbach.
Pretzel is on the back styling chair, the one closest to the window. She picked it. She has been on it since intake.
The intake notes describe her as: female, tabby-and-white, neutered (likely), approx. 4 years, weight 7 lbs 2 oz, BCS 4/9, bobbed tail (congenital, no injury history), eyes clear, ears clear, dental grade 1 (excellent), URI negative, FIV/FeLV negative, microchip negative. Notes: stepped out of carrier on her own. Walked across the floor. Selected a styling chair. Looked back at intake volunteer Andrea Sims once. Did not vocalize.
Andrea has been a Cat Rescue Manitoba volunteer for nine years. She has seen many cats step out of carriers. She has never, she said, had a cat select a styling chair before. She used the word three times in the intake notes.
Pretzel has, since arriving, taken three actions of her own volition:
Action one: she walked, on day two, from the back styling chair to the front counter, sat on the appointment book, and waited for someone to remove her. When Yvonne lifted her off, Pretzel did not protest. She walked back to the styling chair.
Action two: she introduced herself, on day three, to a long-haired senior gray tabby named Tuesday (named by intake; we know nothing about her prior name) who had been in URI isolation in the back room. Tuesday is the second-oldest cat from the house and was the first to come out of isolation. Pretzel walked into the back room, sat three feet from Tuesday’s crate, and stayed there for forty-five minutes. Tuesday, who had not eaten in two days, ate.
Action three: she selected, on day four, a volunteer. The volunteer is Margaret Loewen, sixty-eight, a retired schoolteacher from Steinbach who has been driving in three days a week for the last eleven years to clean litter boxes and run laundry. Pretzel walked across the salon floor on day four, climbed up Margaret’s leg, settled in Margaret’s lap, and stayed.
Margaret called her husband, Henry, that night. She said: Henry. We’re going to need to talk about something.
Henry said: Okay.
Margaret said: There is a cat.
Henry, who has been married to Margaret for forty-six years, said: How big a cat.
Margaret said: Seven pounds. Tabby. No tail.
Henry said: When are you bringing her home.
Pretzel is being adopted by the Loewens. The paperwork is done. She is going to Steinbach tomorrow. Margaret will bring her in a borrowed carrier with a fleece blanket and a small dish of treats. She has, this morning, sent a photograph of the prepared cat room — their adult son’s old bedroom — to Yvonne, with the caption: I think this will do.
The other forty-two cats are being adopted, one at a time, into foster-to-adopt and direct-adopt placements across Manitoba. Six have already gone home. Three more have signed paperwork. The rest are working through the slow process of being made adoptable, which for older feral-adjacent cats can take months.
The homeowner has been told, by Yvonne, on her weekly visit, that Pretzel is being adopted by a former teacher in Steinbach. He nodded. He said, quietly: that’s good. She was always teaching me things. She belongs in a house with a teacher.
If you are in Manitoba and you have ever thought about a cat who steps out of a carrier and walks across a room and picks a styling chair, Cat Rescue Manitoba is at 542 Selkirk Avenue in Winnipeg. They are open Wednesday through Sunday afternoons. They have, today, ten cats available for adoption from the Treherne intake.
They will likely have ten more by next week.
Bring a fleece blanket. They always need more.