KAREN POLESIR stands in the kitchen in her cozy one-bedroom Ambler apartment, the kettle boiling for English tea, as her cat, Harley, sits perched on a chair at the table, a scrunchie around her neck, as if she's a toddler waiting for cake.

"She's like a dog," says Polesir. "She loves hair ties. I throw them across the floor and she brings them back to me."

The name Harley seems more suited for a crazed pitbull, but here's how Polesir explains the name for her tortoise-shell cat with piercing, sea-green eyes who was abandoned on a doorstep: "She purrs like an engine."

Given that Polesir is director of the Philadelphia chapter of th...

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