How one woman created a home for old, blind and neglected cats | members only

Hoffman and her husband soon moved into a house — to get “more space for the cats and ourselves,” she says — and went back to school at Pierce College in Los Angeles, earning a veterinary

technician degree in 2014. “I decided if I was going to devote myself to special-needs cats, I better know what the hell I'm doing,” she says. Over the years, thanks to a lot of

volunteers and $20,000 in seed funding donations, Milo’s Sanctuary has grown from a few dozen cats in Hoffman’s living room to a sprawling two-and-a-half-acre facility in Mojave, about a

half-hour drive from Hoffman’s home in Palmdale, that can house 100 rescue cats at a time. She also shelters pigs, ducks, chickens and a few peacocks. “When I was a little girl, if anybody

asked what I wanted to do when I grew up, I always said I wanted to run a farm,” she says. “It took 60 years, but that dream finally came true.” Michele Hoffman loves all cats equally, but

admits a soft spot for calicos. "Because they are very bossy and very direct," she says. AARP Studios A LIFELONG COMMITMENT Her passion for strays began in childhood, much to her

mother’s chagrin. At just 6 years old, Hoffman began bringing lost dogs, cats, injured birds, seagulls with fishing hooks stuck in their beaks and any wildlife she could catch back to their

small home in Santa Barbara, California. “My mother was a huge animal lover, except she hated cats,” Hoffman says. (Her father passed away when she was just 4.) “But I loved cats, especially

wild cats. I’d go out with a little fox toy attached to a string and a stick, and I’d catch a cat and bring it inside, and hide it upstairs until my mom found it. This went on for my entire

life.” Today, she doesn’t just take in cats from across Southern California, but much of the country and the world. She’s accepted cats from Mexico, Egypt and Turkey. “I like to say that

we’ve become the U.N. of cat rescue,” she says, laughing.