Lost: One beloved cat

It's an experience that every loving pet owner fears, me included. My cat is a great outdoor cat, I thought. She will always be safe. She will always come back. Nothing bad will ever happen to her. After all, she can climb trees, catch mice and she knows how to stay safe around cars. She is a forest cat, a Maine coon. She knows how to hide, to hunt and survive.

When Princess went missing one night in the middle of a mid-September weekend, I experienced simultaneous panic and denial. I told myself that she was just exploring farther afield. Maybe she met a tomcat. There was no way that she was lost.

I called the RCMP but was told that there was only one report of a found cat and it didn't match. I called vet clinics but only one was open, and they took down my report in case anything turned up.

I canvassed my street, meeting neighbours (some for the first time), and asked if they had seen anything or heard any catfights in the night. Some said that they knew my cat without knowing me. Many let me look around in their backyards. All of them seemed sad at my loss.

The next day, I started putting up the posters, checking the Edmonton Humane Society and the City of Edmonton Animal Care and Control Centre, both located side by side on 163 Street just south of 137 Avenue, not far from my Grandin home. Princess had a tattoo but not a microchip.

I checked lost cat ads on Kijiji. I put my own notice in the paper and on PetLynx.net, a website perfectly suited for just my situation.

Several calls came in. I checked them all out. Some of them were close but none of them were her. The search lasted for weeks.

I lost my cat, Princess, and she didn't come back.

What pet owners can – and should – do

The website for the Alberta Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (at www.albertaspca.org) has a list of recommendations for action: search the neighbourhood, contact local vets plus city bylaw or animal control officials, and visit the pound. It also suggests putting up posters around your area, as well as making ads for the newspaper and the Internet, using PetLynx and Petfinder.

There are no statistics on how many house pets go missing each year in St. Albert but there are always posters on telephone poles and mailboxes. It isn't a rarity.

According to Shawna Randolph, the spokesperson for the Edmonton Humane Society, the numbers are steadily climbing. In 2010, there were 187 strays transferred to that facility from this city alone. In 2011, the count went to 203. So far this year, there have been 216.

"The big thing is to try and do preventative medicine as much as possible, Randolph said. "Of course, microchipping wouldn't prevent a pet from getting lost but it definitely makes it easier to try and get them home."

This identification method involves inserting a little computer chip under an animal's skin. The chip holds electronic information that makes it easier for shelters and vets to identify the animal and determine where it belongs, even if they're not wearing a tag, Randolph said.

"It's so important to have proper identification so that if you do have a cat that likes to bolt, at least there's a good opportunity for it to be reunited with you," she said.

It's up to the pet owner to ensure that the chip has current contact information on it otherwise it won't be effective. This is why all of the cats and dogs are microchipped before they can be adopted out from the society.

She said tattoos are good too but they tend to smudge and become illegible over the years.

Randolph also recommended that pet owners visit the facility in person or peruse its lost animals in care website every few days. If your pet is not claimed within this time period then it is made available for adoption.

"Someone should be looking every day and not just for a week because your animal could be wandering for awhile and then be found and brought here, or someone could be holding onto your pet. You just never know. We've reunited pets after several months … many, many months after they come. We always say 'never give up'."

She does admit that there is a wide spectrum of unknowns that could explain what happens to some pets that don't return.

"There are so many things that can happen. It could get hit by a car. It could be harmed by another animal. Someone could not like the animal roaming and try to do harm to it like poisoning or trapping, or it could be a victim of wildlife. Coyotes or foxes or birds of prey like owls and hawks have been known to easily swoop up rabbits. It's more likely something like that is going to happen with a cat because the cat is out roaming longer than a dog."

"Dogs don't really stay on the streets that long. More people are likely to see a dog wandering around and try to find its owner, than a cat. When you see a cat wandering, many people think 'That cat's owner allows them to roam'. You don't think that cat is lost."

The other possibilities

Garnet Melnyk, senior peace officer with the City of St. Albert, says the public should be aware that cat traps are legal and in use throughout the city, but their owners are under strict obligations for caring for any animal that gets caught.

"If you rent one or buy one, there are certain standards that you have to abide by. You can't just set the trap up and forget about it. Once you catch a cat in a trap, you now become legally responsible to care for that animal," he said.

The full set of rules for pet trap usage can be found on the city's website at www.stalbert.ca under municipal enforcement services.

Melnyk said the city does not require humane traps to be registered with the city. Because of this, people who have lost pets don't have any way of determining who in their neighbourhood has a trap in use. He added that there have not been any reports of inhumane cat traps for a few years now.

He said traps are only one scenario out of many for lost pets, and that includes being hit by a car and intentional or unintentional poisonings.

"(The cat) could have drank antifreeze on the roadway and expired underneath a tree in a remote location. If animals are dying, they seek a quiet place that's out of the way. Worst case scenario is somebody could say, 'Hey, cool cat! There's no ID. I'm going to keep it. That can happen. There's a whole host of unknowns."

Sometimes they come back

Len Koenig and Kelley Ramsden went through something very similar to me when Charlie, their 16-year-old Maine coon, got out of their house the day after Princess went missing.

Neighbours had reported spotting Charlie but no one was able to catch the runaway. At one point, 49 days after she first went missing, she got her paw stuck in her collar, allowing neighbours to catch and return her.

"It's kind of a miracle," Ramsden added. "She was hiding so well we couldn't find her."

Koenig said his research into lost pets revealed that 85 per cent of lost cats are still within a five-house radius of home.

"We put out so many posters and flyers in mailboxes … we must have gone around three or four times all in the area. We believed that our cat was still alive," he said.

Ramsden confessed that this would have been a case where they could have used a cat trap and a bowl of Charlie's food in order to get her back. Others had told them that putting the cat's litter out or a piece of recently worn clothing would help to attract it back home.

Together, they both said that they never stopped believing that Charlie was out there.

"It's amazing how long they can be away for. Never give up hope," Koenig stated, before ending, "I'm just glad it's over!"