PostYourAnimal meets FeelGoodFilter
August 23, 2019 5:53 PM   Subscribe

It took SPCA employee Carol O'Connell three years to get close enough to pet a stray cat that had been coming by her home every now and then. Then she borrowed a chip scanner from work and discovered Tiger had been missing for eleven years.
posted by jocelmeow (8 comments total) 27 users marked this as a favorite
 
But does he remember the sound that they found for him?
posted by tavella at 5:59 PM on August 23, 2019 [12 favorites]


My first memory; I was two years old and there was a shockingly large cat on a rug under a glass table.

My family adopted one of her tricolored kittens. We named her Nøste (Yarn Ball).

For 15 years she always hung out with me when I was home. Then she disappeared and was gone for 7 months.


We all assumed she had died. We lived on the edge of a forest. She had either been taken by a fox or gone off to die in private as cats are prone to.

I'ts May and we're having a big family barbecue. 15 of us. A cat slowly moves out of the hedge, looks around, starts sprinting and jumps on my chest and bumps her head all over me. Then jumps over to my sister and does the same ritual. Then my parents.

She was back and in perfect health. She lived another 4 years, then disappeared, this time probably for good. She would be in her early 40's by now, but I'm still crossing my fingers.
posted by Dumsnill at 6:22 PM on August 23, 2019 [86 favorites]


A Very Good Cat I know is currently two months gone. He had a collar and a chip. We are still hoping he'll return.
posted by BlahLaLa at 7:45 PM on August 23, 2019 [11 favorites]


My family had a cat return to us after I think about 6 years.

We were told they'd run away but when we moved back to the area, a stray cat showed up, we adopted and named them only to find when scanning occurred that we had already previously named them.
posted by Acid Communist at 11:53 PM on August 23, 2019 [9 favorites]


BlahLaLa: keep hope alive. When I was a kid, my cat once disappeared for nearly a year. He eventually sauntered in one day with a notched ear, ribs standing out because of his new scrawniness, and a 45-degree bend in the last bone of his tail where it had broken and healed badly. He made no ceremony of his return, just walked over to the food bowl (his sister was a homebody and had stayed with us) and helped himself.

We never figured out where he had been, but he hardly went outside the rest of his days (and never again overnight, so far as I can recall).
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:13 AM on August 24, 2019 [5 favorites]


We adopted a mostly feral kitten when I was little. Frisky loved my brother but despised the rest of us. She enjoyed a good bowl of cat food and heater to sleep in front of. We had to board her while out of town, and she somehow escaped at the vet (she hated the vet). They felt terrible about it. It was a pretty urban area, but we put up signs all over the place hoping she would somehow survive.

3 months later, having mourned her thoroughly, we get a call from a Hardee's employee who recognized her picture on our sign as one of the feral cats who hung out at the dumpster but was friendlier than the others.

She lived another 8 years or so, but after my brother went away to college, she entered a period of poor health, started spending more time outside where she was uncatchable, and finally disappeared for good. For years, I had dreams of her just showing back up again, because it seemed right that she would.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:34 AM on August 24, 2019 [6 favorites]


This is a beautiful story, thank you for sharing it.
posted by daisyk at 9:05 AM on August 25, 2019


Well I’m for sure getting my little Lwaxana chipped this weekend now. Thanks for the impetus.
posted by MsDaniB at 8:27 PM on September 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


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