“He looked like the most unhappy cat ever, but him and I got to be friends. As the days lingered, Buddy would slowly flash glimpses of himself to Baker. “But he first showed up on camera early January and he became a nightly visitor, as well as one original cat I called Rafter.”īuddy, known as Zeppelin in his prior life with Hobbins, mostly visited the styrofoam hut at night. “I’m not sure when Buddy showed up,” Baker said. Their 24-hour cat camera, however, quit working. Sure enough, once the weather got colder, the cats began to appear. Image captured of Zeppelin from the 24-hour video surveillance in the cat house.
“We built a covered four-walled house and we put in a heated water dish and some food dishes, and we set a security camera in there.” “Me and the boyfriend, we built an addition onto the sleeping house,” Baker said. Regina Cat Rescue supplied her with a styrofoam box with a big, fluffy bed, and a little window with a curtain. Immediately, Baker contacted Regina Cat Rescue and requested to acquire a cat house for stray cats. Shortly after this, snow came, and imprinted clearly in the fresh powder were little cat paw-prints. I realized, ‘Oh, there’s something hungry in the yard,’ so I put out some dog crunchies and a bowl of water and the next morning I went out and just a little bit of the crunchies were gone, but the whole big bowl of water was gone. “Some food was kind of dragged out towards the fence,” Baker said. For Baker, it was a regular routine until she observed one of the bags she had previously tossed was torn open. One chilly morning in November 2020, Phyllis Baker was throwing her garbage out in the alley behind her house. Two lives down, seven to go: The home away from home There was even a new addition to the family - Magnolia, a kitten she adopted in January of 2021.īut one day in May of 2021, Hobbins received a message on Instagram indicating that perhaps Zeppelin hadn’t reached the great beyond. My friend gave me a picture of him in a frame that we have in the living room, you know, had a little tribute to him.”
My boyfriend even made me a mug with Zeppelin’s face on it. “We took his ashes out to Wascana Trails and we spread them and I said some words,” Hobbins said. To cope, she wrote a song called “Marmalade Muse,” an ode to Zeppelin, and at one point contemplated getting a tattoo of a tiger to represent him. “It was one of the top three hardest things.”Īs one does after a loss, Hobbins began adjusting to life without her trusted sidekick. Right then and there she opened her wallet and paid $300 to cremate her cat. It’s him.”Īfter explaining her story to the Regina Humane Society, the staff asked Hobbins how she wished to proceed. “I looked at him and just knew it was my Zeppelin. “I just looked at him and felt like Harry Potter when Cedric Diggory dies and they find him and his dad’s like, ‘My boy! My boy!’ “They had him in a box wrapped in this velvet dress that my friend had in her car,” Hobbins said. I am sorry, we think it’s him,’ ” Hobbins recalled.ĭeeply upset and saddened at the circumstances, Hobbins met her friends at the Regina Humane Society. “I was driving to yoga and they called me and they’re like, ‘We think it’s him, we’ve looked at so many pictures and he has all the markings. (Desiree Hobbins)Ī couple of Hobbins’ friends volunteered to go down to the scene of the crime to determine whether or not the cat was indeed her beloved Zeppelin. Missing cat poster of Zeppelin made by Desiree Hobbins. The post included a description of a cat, similar to that of Zeppelin, that had been found dead on North Winnipeg Street. He is my baby… I had him since I was in Grade 12, so he was eight years old.”įor Hobbins, there was a glimmer of hope that Zeppelin would return, but that light dimmed a week later when a post was made on Regina Lost and Found Pets. “I would run home at lunchtime to look for him. “I walked around the neighbourhood putting up posters, talking to neighbours,” Hobbins said. Zeppelin would routinely linger in the yard, but after days of not returning Hobbins became concerned. In September 2020, Hobbins’ orange tabby cat - Zeppelin, known as Zeppy - went missing from her Cathedral-neighbourhood home. It sounds like a scene out of the Stephen King film Pet Sematary, but for Desirée Hobbins, it’s real life. “It was like, ‘Hi Desirée, I believe we have your friend here’, and it was a picture of Zeppelin, and I was like, what? No. “I checked my Instagram and I see there’s a message from Regina Cat Rescue,” said Desirée Hobbins, 26.
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