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The idea of building a better cat carrier came to me after four years of volunteering for a animal rescue that mostly deals with cats. I had picked up countless numbers of cats from people that needed transport to a veterinarian, so many of them were in carriers that were falling apart and missing pieces, most of those carriers were not even that old, they were just of poor quality and design. There were quite a few times that the cat’s owner would wait for me to get there and put the cat in the carrier. They were not comfortable putting their own cat in a carrier because it was such a stressful situations. I always tried to be as gentle as possible with the cat, but traditional hard shell cat carriers simply are not designed with the cat’s comfort and safety in mind. In the back of my mind I always knew that there had to be some better way of doing this. The situation was always exacerbated when doing a rescue, trying to catch and coral a feral cat, or transfer from a live trap to a carrier or a transfer cage, was always very stressful on the cat and sometimes even dangerous. But it wasn’t until about a year ago that I had one of my own rescued cats, Mr. Squidward, at the veterinarians office. Knowing at the time my cat was going through kidney failure, as I sat in the examination room waiting on the veterinarian with my cat sitting on my lap, I tried desperately to take my mind off of the seriousness of the situation. A year before that, the woman who runs the rescue that I volunteer for told me how cats feed off of their humans emotions. I guess subconsciously I had always known that but it was at that moment while sitting waiting for the veterinarian to return that it came full circle for me. So while trying to keep my cat as stress-free as possible, as I continued to pet him my mind focused on his carrier sitting across the room. I sat there looking at it and the ideas started to come to me fast and furious, as soon as I got back home I wrote down my ideas. Then, just a few days later I started drawing out my design. For the next six months I designed and built then redesigned and rebuilt all in order to make sure that my design ideas worked together. During that time I spoke to several veterinarians and everybody I knew in the local rescue community about my ideas. It was unanimous, from the feedback I got from them, that my design ideas were on the right track.The carrier that you have seen in this video was inspired by not just my love and respect for all animals but a necessity born out of frustration, keeping them safe and comfortable while in transport. Mark Kuhl

MKuhl@KuhlKarrier.com