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The Return of the Queen
So on Monday June 29th, the cat-sitter lost Missy. I’m not going into details, because I want this to be a happy post, but the short version is I had to cancel my vacation and fly back home to search for Missy.
Then, one and a half weeks later, on Wednesday July 8th, Missy jumped into my arms and let me carry her back home.
Let’s set up some backstory for how we got from there to here. When someone’s cat goes missing, a lot of people will put up LOST CAT posters. This is good for visibility and for letting people know that you’ll be snooping around in people’s yards, but most of the time, your cat will be hiding, so your neighbors will never see them. Lots of people will also visit nearby shelters to see if a cat has been brought in. This rarely happens, because again, cats stay hidden, so people don’t usually find them, let alone bring them into a shelter. And its unnecessary, since if your cat is microchipped, the shelter will contact you. That said, these are still good steps to take to cover your bases.
Ultimately, the best advice I got was from Missing Pet Partnership, which has a lot of resources about how to find lost cats (and dogs too, I guess) and even a free help hotline (although you really should donate, since they provide a great service). I also got in touch with a local pet detective Roaming Paws Lost Pet Services (Facebook), a one-detective business run by a professional pet detective named Bonnie. She gave me a lot of advice, and I was bouncing ideas off her pretty much daily toward the end.
The best thing you can do to find a lost cat is to set up a feeding station–and possibly a humane cage trap (don’t worry, these things are safe)–and some wildlife cameras, ideally near where your cat got out (or in my case, where I spotted Missy for multiple nights before I finally caught her on camera). The camera I used and wholeheartedly recommend is the Bushnell 6MP Trophy Cam. It’s not too expensive, has good picture quality, compact, and customizable. (The only caveat is when you turn it off, you should wait about a minute before popping the SD card to make sure it’s written everything and not corrupted your SD card.)
I got into a daily routine, where at 8pm, I would feed Jareth, then I would set food in the feeding stations and in the cage trap, bring out a fresh bowl of water, then set up the cameras overnight, and observe the footage in the morning. The end game was to get Missy into the habit of eating food near the trap, then eventually move the food closer to the trap, and then finally in the trap. Then, I would arm the trap, and the next time Missy went in for food, I would catch her and bring her home.
It never came to that. In a good way.
It was Wednesday morning, when I observed the Missy usually showed up on camera between 1am and 3am, and was barely touching her food. Since I feed her wet food, it’s prolly getting old and stale by the time she came out, so she didn’t find it very appetizing. (Missy has always been a picky eater.) So I figured instead of setting the feeding stations at 8:30pm, I should set them later, so the food would be fresher.
That and, Wednesday night is DnD night with my DnD friends. I originally wasn’t going to go, but since I decided to set the food out later that night, I decided, what the hell, I’ll go.
So I finally got home at 10:15pm, fed Jareth, and then set the food out at 10:30pm. I went back inside to change the water, and when I came back out, the food was gone. Eaten. I was away for less than 5 minutes! I went back inside to get the memory cards for the cameras (since I had removed them in the morning so I could view the footage during lunch break at work), and while I was setting up the cameras, I heard someone meowing at me.
I followed the meows into the neighbor’s yard, and there Missy was, meowing at me from the bushes. Now like I always say, cats are like girls, the more you chase them, the more they run away. So I sat in the grass and gently coaxed her to me. It took me a few tries, but soon, she came up to me and started nuzzling my hand with her forehead (like how she used to do back at home). And then, she hopped into my lap, where I scooped her up and carried her around my neighbor’s house and through my front door back home.
It’s funny. I’ve been so excited to have Missy back home, I haven’t even taken down the wildlife cameras or the cage trap yet. (I’ll get right on that.) Also, in a weird way, DnD helped me get my Missy back.