Animal Shelter Tells Woman That The Cat She Wants To Adopt Is $900 Because It's 'Special'
Looks like a grey tabby to me.
TikTok “Adopt, don’t shop” is always the morally correct way to go about acquiring your newest furry companion. Except, maybe not when that adoption runs you $900 dollars.
TikTok creator Chloe Mitchell, who has nearly 3 million followers, recently posted a video on March 8, 2023, introducing all of her followers to the cat that she was planning on adopting at the shelter. The one problem? That cat costs $900.
The animal shelter claims that the cat costs $900 because she’s a rare African Savannah.
“$900?! That’s like two-thirds of a Yorkie!” Mitchell jokes in a TikTok video explaining the situation. “I’m gonna cry. I found the one cat in West Michigan that is $900. Why am I yelling?”
She explains how much she’s been through trying to look for the right cat to adopt and how she’s been to six different humane societies on her search — “I fall in love with this cat.”
“This is my second day seeing her,” Mitchell says, overlaying a short clip of her second meeting with the gray feline. “I get here early so that nobody else sees her except me.”
When she went to the shelter workers ready to adopt the cat, they mistakenly assumed that they had already talked to her about the cat’s special case. After she said no, they hadn’t talked to her about it, they said “yeah she’s $900. She’s an African Savannah, she’s super rare.”
“1. What the hell is an African Savannah, 2. Why isn’t there a price tag on her cage? And 3. Do you have coupons?” Mitchell jokingly asked.
She spends the next minute of the video contemplating the things that she could do with $900 and whether or not she should really spend that much money on the cat. She complains about the price but seems adamant about getting her.
In a follow-up video, she explains why the price seems to be so high.
“$900 for a rescue cat, like, that has to be illegal. But why is she so expensive? Apparently, she’s a Generation 5 African Savannah,” she explains. “The backstory is that she was rescued from a breeder and the breeder had the paperwork and five African Savannah kittens.”
The other four kittens had already been adopted, leaving the one that she found to be the last one.
“I can’t leave her there because I’ve bonded with this cat, I don’t think you understand,” she explains. “I love this animal.”
“It explains why she’s been there for seven months and why she’s never been adopted because nobody’s going to spend $900 on a cat in West Michigan,” except for her, of course. She reveals that, after some time away from checking her creator fund on TikTok, she had saved up around $900 — just enough to adopt the cat.
Everyone on TikTok, however, is advising her not to adopt the cat.
“That cat isn’t [an] African savannah cat. That’s just a normal tabby,” one of the top comments on her video read. “She is most definitely not an African Savannah cat,” another user commented.
Many people who were skeptical of the price tag and claims of rarity told Mitchell that she should get them to perform a DNA test for her — which they refused to do. Someone with years of experience handling rescues and working with adoption shelters stitched the video and said much of the same thing.
They claim that it’s actually common for people to stick the wrong tag on cats simply because they might look similar to another breed.
“It’s usually not true,” they said, “but it’s easy to get that tag on there.
The claims that “what’s sideways” about this, however, is that this normally wouldn’t raise the price of the adoption — it normally just helps the animals get adopted faster. They went into comparing the cat in her video to what an African Savannah actually looks like, and they couldn’t be further from similar with the largest difference being that African Savannah cats have spots.
Their advice to Mitchell was to ask for a “blood test” to prove the cat’s lineage, and if they don’t have one or refused to, then they should lower the adoption price.
Despite all of the advice, Mitchell is going all in on the cat, but she did hint that she may dig into the cat’s background after responding to a comment that insinuated a lawsuit was coming.
She left viewers with a clue that she wouldn’t let the $900 price tag stand, and said “This series is about to get so juicy…”
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.