If Griffin – a one-and-a-half-year-old tabby cat – could talk, he’d surely say he used a few of his nine lives in the past six months.
The sought-after feline disappeared through an open back door in October 2015, just three days after his family moved from Deer Ridge to a home on Swallow Crescent. He was reunited with the Abbott family just as suddenly last Monday, after months of neighbourhood posters and online messages and photos led nowhere.
“We had finally given up – I was deleting some of the photos I’d taken of Griffin so we could move on,” admitted Griffin’s owner Claire Abbott, a laser technician at Wandler Chiropractic Clinic. She and her husband Pete and children Jacob, Maisie and Roman, scoured their old Deer Ridge neighbourhood “day and night for months.” They knocked on doors of new neighbours in Sturgeon and posted to the Community of St. Albert Facebook and lost and found web pages.
“We contacted all the vets in town, and there were lots of false alarms of people saying they thought they’d seen him. But once winter and Christmas came, we started to lose hope.”
Not so for 13-year-old Maisie, who said she cried a lot over Griffin these months, but kept track of time.
“I kept count of how long he was gone – six months, two weeks and three days,” said Maisie.
The family waited to surprise her with the news of his return when she came home from school on Monday.
The day of Griffin’s return might never have come if not for his good fortune at wandering into the yard of Braeside resident, Brandie Chugg a couple of weeks ago. Owner of Clippin’ Along, a dog grooming business next to the Tudor Glen Veterinary Clinic, and a volunteer with the Alberta Animal Rescue Crew Society (AARCS), Chugg said she took special notice when she started seeing the cat in her yard each day.
“I watched for awhile and could see he was scared. I’d put out food, and he’d sleep under my van. When I got close enough, I could see his mangled, matted hair, and that he once had a collar,” said Chugg. “I borrowed a humane trap from the AARCS, put food inside, and within a day had trapped him. Then I put his photo on the St. Albert lost and found Facebook page, and brought him into the vet next door.”
Within a day of posting to the Facebook page, lost and found site administrator Robin McCaffry contacted Abbott, saying this cat looked like Griffin who had gone missing months before.
“It looked like Griffin’s face, from the newly posted photo, but I called Brandie to ask if he had a kink in his tail. He did, and so I knew it was him,” said Claire, who brought Griffin home after a day of care at the Tudor Glen Vet Clinic – seven or eight vaccinations, tests and a shaving of all the matted, clumped fur.
“He’s had a few rough days being around people again. The vet said he had definitely been subjected to the elements, (Griffin has a frostbitten ear and eye infection), but each day gets a bit better.”
While the cream and ginger-coloured Griffin rests comfortably on a blanket on Claire’s bed, he’s got furry friends waiting for his recovery. The senior cat of the family, Jasper, looked out the window for months for Griffin, according to the Abbott children. The family recently adopted eight-month-old cat Larry from the Edmonton Humane Society.
“All the cats are microchipped, and now they’re all indoor cats, too,” said Claire. “Griffin is so lucky that it was a mild winter, and that Brandie is the one who found him. The vet said he’ll make a full recovery after his six months as a stray. He’s a St. Albert celebrity now.”
“And what we feel most lucky about is the searching, messages and efforts of everyone who helped bring Griffin home, from Brandie and the vet clinic to those looking out for Griffin through the Facebook site. We can’t thank them enough.”
