Lily the tabby was dumped in london, stuck in her cat carrier

If you were ever in a situation where for some unfortunate reason you had to give up your cat — who, for arbitrary reasons, we’re going to call Little Toodles in this hypothetical musing — there are some obvious and easy steps you could take to ensure that your beloved Little Toodles carried on living a safe and loving life.

You could, for instance, ask family and friends to see if there was any persuading a feline sympathizer to give Little Toodles a new home. After all, she’s a friendly and totally house-trained young feline with a cutie-pie face to boot, so who wouldn’t want to take her?

You could also post to your personal social media circles about Little Toodles’s need for a new home and hope that someone you know might know someone who could take her. As a last resort, you could even try approaching your local no-kill shelter to see if they had room to board her for a while.

You should not, however, leave Little Toodles in a plastic cat carrier that you’ve hidden in some bushes in a public park, without any food or water, and with a hastily handwritten note taped to the top of the carrier.

Sadly, that’s exactly what happened to Little Toodles — or rather Lily, a very real 5-year-old cat who was living in northwest London until someone dumped her in a park.

The rest of Lily’s instruction manual simply stated, “I need a home as I am now homeless. Please take care of me.”

Thankfully, a local dog by the name of Maisie was on the case and staged a heroic rescue mission for Lily while she was out partaking in her morning constitutional in Wormwood Scrubs Park. A 2-year-old English Cocker Spaniel with a grand sense of cross-species civic responsibility, Maisie kept barking at the bushes the carrier had been left in until her owner, Pam, came over to see what all the fuss was about.

“Usually Maisie barks when she wants a stick,” Pam later told the Mayhew Animal Home, “so I got one for her, but she just ignored it and carried on staring at the bushes and would not move – that was when I thought she must have found something.”

With Pam being a cat owner herself, she was shocked when she realized Lily had been left alone, trapped in a cage and without any hope of even scavenging food and water for herself.

After bringing Lily to her own home, Pam whisked her over to the Mayhew Animal Home where she was checked out by the organization’s team of vets. They discovered that Lily was in normal feline working order — other than being totally petrified about the ordeal she’d been subjected to.

The only snafu occurred when Lily’s microchip was discovered: It claimed she was actually 11 years old and included expired contact information. Clearly, despite her sweet and calm nature, Lily was a cat who had been passed around from home to home.

Now for the happy ending: Once Lily had settled into her temporary cat cabin at the Mayhew Animal Home, she found her (hopefully final) forever home in next to no time. She’s said to be enjoying life at her new abode.

So remember, people, don’t dump your cats, because it’s really not cool at all. Also, don’t call your cats Little Toodles — it’s a terrible name, as I’m sure Lily would agree.