A cutesy abandoned cat has sent social media into meltdown as it was born with extra toes and sparklingly different eye colors.
Sansa, a 6-year-old snowy cat, was born with a rare condition known as heterochromia and has two different eye colors: one blue and one green, and extra toes as a result.
The adorable kitty, with six digits on each front paw, and five and four on her hind paws, was found abandoned by animal rescue staff in New York City earlier this year.
Since then, she’s attracted 200,000 fans on social media, and now she’s finally found a new home.
Sansa’s new owner, who only wants to be referred to as Karen, said: “Many people have expressed how much they love Sansa’s uniqueness with her different colored eyes and extra toes.”
Karen, a 33-year-old animal lover, works with a health care consultancy helping patients with serious medical issues such as cancer. She said that she did not adopt Sansa for her uniqueness; rather, she wanted to save her from being confined to a cage as the cat suffered anxiety after being thrown out by previous owners.
“We were informed that her foster desperately wanted her adopted because she was so anxious that she needed to be kept in a carrier at all times,” Karen, of New York City, said.
Karen and her husband met Sansa at a cat-adoption event in New York City.
“Even though there were a lot of cute, friendly cats at the event,” Karen said, “my eyes kept being drawn to Sansa’s cage who was previously called Snow.
“It was a seemingly empty cage with a sign that said the cat inside suffered from anxiety and had been neglected and eventually thrown out by her previous owners,” she said.
“Turns out the cage was not empty,“ she said. ”She was simply hiding under the cat bed!”
Karen said she felt an “immediate connection” to Sansa because she suffers from anxiety herself.
“I knew that I wanted her to be a part of our family before I even saw her,” she said.
“Imagine my surprise when I realized that she had different colored eyes and extra toes.”
While Karen brought Sansa home two days later, it took a long time for Sansa to trust her owners. She was always fearful and would hide behind the TV console whenever the door opened and only came out for food.
It was later found that Sansa also suffered from feline hyperesthesia disorder, a type of anxiety.
Karen said: “Shortly after she came home, we realized that Sansa exhibited strange behaviors in which her back would ‘roll’ uncontrollably, followed by her attacking her tail multiple times a day.
“She seemed to be in pain whenever her back rolled and we could not understand why. We had never seen a cat do this before.”
Karen said they recorded episodes of Sansa’s strange behavior to show the vet, and after some tests, the cat was diagnosed with feline hyperesthesia disorder.
“She was put on different drugs but none seemed to be that effective,” she said, adding that pet CBD oil has helped curb Sansa’s episodes.
“She has claimed the apartment as her own and is the true queen of our household,” Karen said.
“Queen Sansa wakes us up at 6 a.m. every morning to announce that she’s hungry, and if we don’t get up in time, she proceeds to knock things off the nightstand one by one. She knows exactly what she needs to do to get her way.”
Karen said she started an Instagram account, @sansa.thecat, as she wanted to document each day of their journey “caring for an anxious, genetically different cat.”
“Her specialness just makes it a little easier to get peoples’ attention to raise awareness and advocate for the adoption of special needs cats.”
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