S/o cat custody

[puppylove64]

I have a fun story. I had a cat go missing. He was probably 2-3 years old, no trace. I assumed he died. A few years later I got a phone call from an older woman who said there had been a stray cat in her neighborhood for a few months. Her husband died and the neighborhood kids thought that she should adopt this cat for company. She took him in and took him to the vet for a check up. She scanned him for a microchip and came up that he was my cat. She was just calling to let me know he was safe and happy and she wasn’t giving him back 🤣 she had grown quite fond of him and he kept her company. I couldn’t help but laugh at her audacity. I hope they are still doing well.

[fernweh]

I’m amused by this but also not.

On one hand I can picture a little old lady feeling guilty about taking the cat and assuming someone is worried sick and wanting to give them a piece of mind that the pet is safe and loved.
On the other hand if you have no intention of giving it back why even bother to call someone just to tell them you have it and are not giving it back?!

We have never (knock on wood) lost a pet but my vet tells me if they scan and there is a chip that they call the person it’s registered to in order to prevent someone from just keeping it anyway.

[starburst604]

Was he found very far from where he went missing? I have mixed feelings about this happening to me, my cats are very beloved and I'd be devastated for one to go missing (well my Joey cat, the other one eh lol). If I found out years later he was alive and happy, I do think I'd probably be like ok he's safe and loved, I'm relieved he didn't meet a bad ending and I'm not going to uproot his life. But she had some chutzpah!

[MDmomof2]

I lost a cat about 8 years ago. Not chipped and no collar. She was an indoor only cat, but one very cold night our backdoor was not locked and it popped open when the wood warped. We put up signs, told all of our neighbors and hired a scent sniffing dog to track her - twice! We put down food and scent trails from the spot the dog tracked her to back to our house We put out a trap that we checked several times a night. We never found her. I like to think that she found another family and lived happily with them. However, she was kind of a mean cat and unless some time on the run changed her personality, I'm not sure that would happen. I missed her and wished she'd return home but after a while I would have been happy just to know that she was alive, healthy, and well cared for.

[livinitup]

I’ve only had one cat not come home and I would be desperately happy to receive a call that she was alive and well cared for, even years later. Even if you said you were keeping her. Lol.

I have been distributed cats from the universe a few times. Haha. I just thought that happened to people until I said it out loud to H one day.

Yeah, it sounded crazy. H: “How do we adopt a cat?”
Me: “They just show up one day. The cat needs a home and they show up and never leave.” I did cover it a bit with non-crazy info like “sometimes you know someone who has a litter of kittens”.

Anyway, true story - we bought a house and the very first night we owned the place and slept over, a kitten came to our front door, meowed until we let her in, marched in and made herself comfortable. Very comfortable. Neither one of us officially moved in for another month and I did not feel comfortable taking her out of the neighborhood and back to my apartment. I just hoped she belonged to a neighbor and had a home to go back to.

Not so crazy after all !

[goldengirlz]

The cat custody story was the subject of our family evening walk last night ha.

We all agreed that if our cat got lost, we’d hope that this was the outcome. She’s so friendly and she loves people, and it’s better than being eaten by a coyote or mountain lion.

However, if an original owner showed up and tried to claim her, we would not give her up. No way in hell. I’d offer a monetary payment but, nope, she’s ours now.

[YeahSure]

My son and DIL "co-parent" a cat (Simon). Simon "belongs" to someone in the neighborhood but was coming by to hang out in son and DIL's yard. One day they got hold of him to get the info off of his collar and called the owner. Apparently the original family got a puppy and Simon just wasn't as happy there as he used to be. Son and DIL stay in contact with Simon's other "parents" who are happy that Simon has another safe place to be, and are fine with them feeding him and letting him in to play with their other cats. (Side note: it's likely that Simon might be a litter mate to their cat Mittens; both cats were rescued during the same storm, have similar markings, and adore each other).

[MixedBerryJam]

We always named the strays that came to the back door; there were a ton of them bc we had a giant patch of catnip just randomly growing, and with many repeat customers we got to know them. One day a neighbor knocked on my door and asked “Did you just let my cat into your house?” That was one of the friendliest cats I’ve ever met. But one day I had to pick him up inside my house, and he did not like that and tore the shit out of my arm. So I asked them if he had d had his shots and they were all “La dee da no, but we’ll let you know if he starts developing symptoms.” lol. The CAT is not my concern, dude. RIP Oswald (died of old age many years later and I never foamed at the mouth.)

[wawa]

so we're just sharing stories about how cats just happen now, right?

when I was a kid we had horses and a barn and lived in a rural area with lots of other farms and farmettes where barn cats were really common. So there were ALWAYS cats that would just...show up. (We also had indoor cats who were pampered princesses and went nowhere, but the wanderers who claimed us as their own were a different thing)

The first one I remember was named Claud. Because my mom sent my brother out to inspect the random cat meowing on our back porch and was like, "is he clawed or declawed?" and my brother yelled back "clawed!" and that was his name.
The best one was Brutus, who was just such a great cat. great big burly tomcat who purred like a diesel engine. We took him to get snipped after it was apparent he wasn't leaving. He stayed the rest of his life, but never ever wanted to come inside. He loved to be pet, and would sometimes hop in a lap, but you couldn't pick him up. He came inside once when it was really really really cold, laid down in front of the woodstove and bolted as soon as the sun came up, but otherwise he'd just get cozy in the barn or in the blanket boxes we'd set up under the porch. When my mom sold that house she informed the new owners that it came with a cat and they were cool with it. He was in his late teens by then, and the stress of moving across a state with a senior cat who'd only ever been in a carrier once in his life to get his balls chopped seemed ill advised for everyone.
And one of my favorite "tell me a fun fact" stories - we had a mother and daugther pair of pretty little tortoiseshells we called Turtle and Baby Turtle who started hanigng around one summer. They were both pretty feral and would hang out near us, but you couldnt touch them. Turned out they were both pregnant, and they both managed to SNEAK INSIDE THE HOUSE to have their kittens. One got into the crawl space behind my brother's room and dug into the insulation in his wall and had her kittens there, the other had them UNDER MY BED. within weeks of each other. It was kitten-palooza. And then as soon as they weaned both moms bounced again. We found homes for most of them, but kept one kitten, who we named StinkPot after a breed of turtle. Stinkpot lived with us as an indoor/outdoor cat for several years, and then one year he started leaving for stretches and coming back FAT. I eventually figured out through overhearing a conversation on the bus that he'd adopted a family a few miles away and they were the ones feeding the crap out of him. I told her that she should feel free to get him to stay if she could...we always had a few too many cats around (our closest neighbor didn't bother to have their cats spayed/neutered) and he clearly loved it there. Missed him though.

this being ACTUALLY a long time ago (like...the early 90's for brutus. claude was in the 80's) there was no scanning for chips.

Now I live in a suburb and there are cats who wander through our yard, but I don't try to steal them. They clearly live elsewhere in the neighborhood and are just hanging around murdering songbirds.

[MixedBerryJam]

Oh and there was the time a friend announced on Facebook that there were 4 calico kittens under her deck that had been abandoned by their momma, so I said I’d take 2 of them and raced over with my trap (bc of course we had a trap) and some cat food. It turned out they weren’t calicoes, they were TABBBIES which are great, but they’re not calicoes! And then it turned out she only wanted one, so I drove home with 3 tabby kittens and that’s how the Jam Fam ended up with 6 cats.

[babsbunny]

There are too many unwanted pets in my state. I am ecstatic for every cat that finds a loving home.