My brother’s cat was missing for three weeks and then showed up on his deck Sunday night as if nothing had happened. He just was sitting there, pretty as you please, having a smoke and yawning.
Okay, he wasn’t really yawning.
What I really want to know is, where do cats go when this happens? I’ve heard of cats getting stuck in the back of a truck, say, and slowly making their way back from hundreds of miles away. Or a neighbor taking them in and feeding them for a while. While possible, these seem a bit unlikely to me. What would you say the most likely reason is for an extended absence?
Yes, long time ago, I had a young cat go missing for about a week and then show up with a rear leg broken in six places; most likely hit by a car. At a previous house, I fed strays…every now and again one of the “regulars” would stop showing up for days or weeks, then reappear. Often with some sign of injury, like an abcessed bite healing up.
Outdoor cats tend to go to ground if they get injured or sick…if you (and the cats) are lucky, the reappear in the process of healing. I don’t think they tend to go far, under a house maybe, or anywhere dry and dark and warm.
I think that is the most likely reason for extended absence in cats…someone taking them in temporarily is probably a distant second place.
Every cat I’ve ever known to wander off like that (3 in my life, not all mine) never came back, and, I’m assuming, is dead. Indoor/ outdoor cats like to leave and go someplace private to die. Other than that, I have no idea.
Maybe it was sick or injured and got better before it came back…or maybe, it found someone else willing to feed it Friskies Gourmet or something more to its liking for a while.
One more thing: did I forget to mention how absolutely ecstatic I am that “Rudy” is back? I’ve always had a special place for Rudy, and consider him to be part my cat, for reasons I needn’t go into. And much to the (very mild) jealously of my brother and sister-in-law, he always hangs out with me the most when I visit. He’s the big one, showing his little brother the ropes.
Once a stray cat got shut in our garage. The garage is where we store our cat food, so it had evidently gotten into that sack and ate all it wanted to. It found a hidey-hole up in the rafters, and was quite contented to just live there for a time.
When our cat finally communicated to us that there was an intruder in the garage, we scatted it on its way. I suppose it had been with us a week or so, enjoying itself.
I’m sure it went on home when we booted it out, and I’m equally sure that its family was happy, and relieved, to have it with them once again. They probably wondered where in the world it had been all that time.
I have two cats who kept mysteriously disappearing for days, sometimes even a week or more, at a time. They’re mostly outdoors cats, so I used to just assume they’d disappeared forever, then suddenly and nonchalantly, they’d be back on the porch waiting for me. Neither of them looked like they’d been lost or starving, so it became obvious that they were living it up at a neighbor’s house.
My theory was proven when Bobbin got into a scrap and got a bite on his back leg. He disappeared for several days, and when he came back, his leg had been shaven and obviously treated. He was pretty smug about the entire ordeal.
A while back(ten years or so ago), a stray (obviously well fed) cat wandered up to my parents’ house and demanded to come in. Well, he didn’t knock or anything, but he was thrilled when we gave him food. Then I dunno, a few weeks later he ran outside and was gone. So I was very surprised when he was back the next night. He didn’t run away anymore after that. He’s living with aunt and uncle now, and he’s always been a strange if friendly fellow.
We had a cat disappear for the two weeks around Christmas and New Years several years ago. We thought for sure after two weeks he was gone for good. Turns out he was in our neighbor’s garage. They were out of town the whole time and he was shut in there. The must have left food out for their own cats because he seems happy and healthy just sitting on the porch one day.
We had tons of animals growing up. Most of them lived outside some or most of the time. I learned never to write one off completely for a while when they disappeared. The cats were worst. Some of them just disappeared only to show up days or weeks later acting like nothing had happened. I never pressed the issue. I assumed they were just whoring it up or got into gambling debt somewhere and decided to hang low back where they knew it was safe. We had one that disappeared for over 6 months before showing up again but I found him. Goldenrod had decided to go feral and live in the woods full-time. He climbed way up in a tree when I tried to get him and refused to come down. I saw him around for a couple of years but learned to respect it as his lifestyle choice.
The weirdest were two pet rabbits that disappeared on separate occasions for a few days. Domestic rabbits don’t generally do worth a damn in the wild but they just came hippity-hopping back one day. One escaped again later and I don’t think his survival skills were as good as he had come to believe judging by the strange fur patch I found in the woods much later. He must have read Watership Down and took it as a documentary.
My late great kitty once went missing for two days when he was a little kitten, only to come back home stinking like motor oil and gas; my guess is that during his galavanting, he got trapped inside a garage, or possibly a toolshed.
In the case you outline in the OP, most likely he was across town having a grand time being fed and pampered by other humans. Friendly, well-fed ‘stray’ cats used to show up at my house when I was growing up (full of little girls who loved animals) and stick around for the attention and treats…
My cats now are indoor only but when I had indoor-outdoor cats growing up, they would disappear regularly for up to a week or two. We had good luck with our cats on the road, none ever got hit and they always came back when they left. One time our cat was gone for 4 days and came back hungry and disheveled; we assumed he’d gotten locked in someone’s garage or something.
One of my boys, Ozzy, has done this a few times. When I got him I decided he would be an inside only cat, but he really wanted to go out so I started letting him now and then. One of those times he took off and I was sure he wasn’t coming back because a day turned into a week turned into a month. Then one evening there he was, and he waltzed into the house like nothing happened. And aside from a few burrs in his fur he wasn’t any worse for the wear.
After that I have tried to keep him in, but once a year or so he gets out and does his thing
I had this happen. My neighbor thought he was a stray. An 19 lb well-groomed stray wearing a $12.00 collar :rolleyes:.
Anyway, they lured my fat cat in with food treats and thought they were giving him a home. They let him go when he started wrecking their house in an effort to get out and come back home.
We had a cat disappear for more than a week shortly after we moved cross-country when I was 11. My parents had privately given up on him, but he showed up one night, peering in the glass patio door as if he wasn’t sure he had the right house. We figure he just got lost in the new neighborhood.
My cat disappeared for a month last year. She came back with no visible marks but much, much thinner, and she smelled like a dumpster. Survival skills, she has them. She’s one tough little bee. I’ve seen her send a male cat who was three times her weight into a full retreat.
She didn’t really come back, exactly. Instead, one day I’m leaving home and see a familiar-looking little thing striding purposely, on a trajectory that would have taken her to a dumpster. I called, she looked, she looked astonished, she ran under a car and called to me, and then she finally came out and let me pick her up (and the smell, my God, the smell was awful.)
Now, we live in one of those apartment complexes where all the buildings sort of look alike. Our door is the first one on the right. Sometime after we found her, we were telling the story to some random neighbor out walking her dog, and she told us that she had witnessed a cat, fitting the description of our cat, repeatedly pawing at the first door on the right of a completely different building. Our poor cat–she was disoriented.
My parents’ cat, who always lived a bit dangerously*, disappeared once. Well, he disappeared a few times, but one time is especially memorable. My parents searched the neighborhood and asked the neighbors if they’d seen him, but no luck. They spent a couple of weeks being sad, then decided to accept a co-worker’s offer of a new kitten. The new kitten had moved in and was just starting to make himself at home when someone knocked on the door. It was a builder who had stopped in to inspect the final touches on a house that had recently been completed in the neighborhood. He had found poor Kitty in the basement of this unoccupied house, and after asking around a bit, learned that my parents were missing a cat. Kitty had been trapped for three to four weeks with no food and very little water. He was a comatose pile of skin and bones, but after a trip to the emergency vet for an IV and lots of rest and food, he was soon up and about again. Fortunately, the new kitten absolutely adored Kitty.
*He spent several months homeless, after being abandoned by his previous family. He acquired FIV somewhere along the way. He had several bones broken in his face after being hit by an unidentified blunt object. Most dramatically, he got a punctured lung and several broken ribs when a coyote tried to eat him for breakfast. He probably should have been a poster-cat for indoor-only living, except that he died of old age.
