This Special Needs Cat Has a Crooked Face, a Dangling Tongue, and an Absolutely Perfect Life

Some animals enter your life quietly. Figaro did not. He arrived with a crooked face, a permanently dangling tongue, and a drool situation that could generously be described as considerable.

He arrived missing half his facial structure, one set of whiskers, and any apparent awareness that he was supposed to feel sorry for himself - He did not.

It was January 2019, the middle of a New York winter, when a six-week-old kitten was found on the streets of Elmhurst, Queens, with severe injuries to his face. Nobody knows exactly what happened.

Maybe he chewed on an electrical wire. Maybe he picked a fight with a raccoon and the raccoon won decisively. What mattered was that this tiny, battered scrap of a cat was in serious trouble, the odds stacked high against him.

Rescue organization Puppy Kitty NYC rushed him to the hospital, where he would spend the next month doing the one thing nobody expected from an animal so small and so broken: fighting. Not just surviving — fighting.

With a stubbornness that made veterinarians shake their heads and smile at the same time, this kitten decided, in whatever wordless way cats decide things, that he was going to live.

It was during those long hospital weeks that Meagan first came to visit him. She walked through the door, looked at this battered, bandaged, ridiculous little cat — and that was that. She was finished. Some cats choose their people through grand gestures. Figaro barely had to try.

The medical road was long. There was a first surgery to repair his face. Then a second, a flap surgery meant to help close the wound. MRIs. Consultations. Follow-up appointments. An emergency visit for a damaged nasal turbinate, the details of which remain somewhat mysterious.

Through all of it, Figaro remained magnificently unbothered. Vet trips were not his favorite activity, it's true. But as long as there were belly rubs on the other side of them, he considered this a fair arrangement.

The surgeries only partially worked. His face would never be fully reconstructed, and after careful conversations with the surgical team, Meagan and her husband Gregg made the decision that more procedures simply weren't worth putting him through.

His condition was manageable. It was no obstacle to a full life. And so, Figaro went home — first to a foster arrangement that was supposed to be temporary.

It was not temporary.

The "foster" situation lasted approximately as long as it took Meagan and Gregg to accept what had already become obvious: they were completely, helplessly in love with this peculiar little animal.

Figaro became family. And family, as it turns out, comes with a permanently dangling tongue, one impressive snaggle tooth, and an exposed nasal passage that requires daily gentle cleaning.

a smell emanating from his fur that Meagan has described, with the specificity of someone who has truly earned the right to describe it, as not unlike wet beef.

She shaves the fur around his face regularly to keep his skin clean and healthy. She wipes out his nasal passage with a damp cloth. Beyond that? He is, as she puts it, totally normal.

Very, very hungry. But totally normal.

Food is Figaro's primary purpose, his highest calling, and his most consuming life goal. He has stolen directly from plates. He has interrupted cooking sessions with demands to be compensated in chicken.

He once ate Meagan's lunch with the air of someone who had done nothing wrong and would do it again. No unattended piece of poultry is safe! 

He campaigns for more food the way other cats campaign for nothing because they are simply lying in a sunbeam. Figaro has opinions about chicken. Vigorous, vocal opinions.

When he's not managing his food concerns, he is destroying carpets — not out of malice, just out of commitment to who he is — and hunting his beloved wand toy with a ferocity that suggests he believes the apartment is genuinely at risk.

When he catches it, he prances back with the pride of an animal who has just saved everyone's lives and would like that acknowledged.

Beneath all the chaos and the drool and the carpet destruction, he is, by all accounts, one of the most loving cats Meagan has ever known. They cuddle every night. He has a way, she says, of making any bad day simply disappear.

Six years after he was found on a Queens street corner with the odds against him, Figaro has nearly 280,000 people following his life on Instagram — watching a tonguey, one-snaggle-toothed, perpetually damp cat steal food and menace toy wands. The comments pour in calling him joyful, adorable, life-giving.

Meagan and Gregg have used that platform to say something they believe matters: that special needs animals deserve a chance. That a little extra care is not a burden. That it is, in fact, a privilege.

When people have suggested online that Figaro should have been euthanized, that his life couldn't possibly be worth living, Meagan has had a simple response: watch a few videos.

Watch a cat with opinions about chicken and a personal vendetta against floor coverings. Watch a cat who does not know he is different, and who, if he did know, would almost certainly not care in the slightest.

Today, Figaro has a warm apartment, a devoted family, a special needs brother named Legend, an endless supply of toys, and an eternal, unshakeable optimism that the next unattended piece of chicken just might finally be his.

In short, he has everything he could ever dream of, and he has always known it.

Check him out in the video below:

A big thank you to Meagan and Gregg for sharing Figaro's story with us.

You can see more of this delightful kitty on Instagram

Related story: Two-Legged Rescue Cat Shows Amazing Spirit After Finding Forever Home

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