I had a cat disappear for 6 weeks and come home meowing his brains out. He never told me where he was.
YouTube has a whole slew of videos shot by tiny cameras attached to cats. Here’s a search for Cat Cam -
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cat+cam&aq=f
Some interesting things there. Cats are weird even when no one is looking at them.
Growing up, we had a cat (Socks) who was too curious for her own good. Sometimes she’d be MIA for a few days. She’d come back skinny. We didn’t know what she was doing until our neighbor filled us in. They went away for a long weekend and when they returned to their house, they hit the garage door opener…and Socks came sprinting out!
Turned out that Socks liked to snoop in any vehicle or structure within her territory…and she had a very large territory. Sometimes she would get accidentally locked in somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be.
[Socks was a cool cat. Once, she hopped into the UPS man’s truck to check it out, and he didn’t find her in there until he was well along his route. (Fortunately, he’d caught her snooping in the past and knew where she lived. He returned her.)
Another time, she took a nap on a neighbor’s car and wasn’t discovered until the driver accelerated around a curve. Socks came sliding down the windshield on her belly and made a mad leap for the curb. She sauntered home relatively unscathed and acting as if nothing strange had happened.
The whole neighborhood knew her, and thought she was awesome. We were always hearing stories through the grapevine about her adventures.]
Oh, and the times Socks came home well-fed? She had the habit of temporarily adopting other families, particularly if she felt we weren’t being attentive enough to her whims. She had plenty of admirers in the neighborhood who were more than happy to treat her with tuna if she would hang around and kill all the vermin in their yards.
We bought a house. We went over to check it out before closing and thought we heard a cat meowing. That cat, which belonged to the neighbor across the street, had been in our shed for a week. She must’ve gotten in when the previous occupants were moving out which, fortunately, was not long before we took possession. She ran out, went down the driveway a bit and, although she must have been starving and dehydrated, stopped on our driveway to fluff up her fur a bit. We didn’t find out until later that she belonged to our neighbors. Or that she’d been missing for a week.
I’ve had cats disappear for periods of up to a week and then return, but they are usually hungry, skinny, dirty, and sometimes a bit roughed up. I’m still glad to see them.
While my SO and I were off on a week’s holiday a few months ago, her father stayed at our house and cared for our animals. He appears at some point to have let all of our five indoor cats loose into the world. Although four came back more or less immediately, one remained gone at the time of our return. The one who left — Anastasia — is an … interesting girl; she hates and fears the rest of the cats and is by far the smartest of all of them. She’s not too big on humans, either, with the exception of Colleen, and she’d even turn on her at the drop of a hat.
After a few weeks we began to assume that she stayed away because she was simply unhappy. She never came back, at least of her own accord. Three weeks later we found her at the shelter, thin as a rail — having dropped maybe a quarter of her body weight and she wasn’t a portly cat to start with — and suffering a terrible cold. She was brought in from animal control, for reasons we don’t know, and I have no way of knowing what she did or where she stayed. I’m nevertheless terribly curious.
Whatever happened, clearly her “vacation” didn’t agree with her.
(Now she lives in the master bedroom with me, away from the other cats, with her own food and litter box and large closet to hide in. She seems much happier and is even warming up to me. Although she did pee on my backpack last week …)
We had a purebred Siamese cat several decades ago. Back then we used to let our cats roam outside. She crept into the open window of a visitor’s car. When the visitor left, of course the cat was unhappy because she did not like riding in the car and complained about it. The old fool simply opened the car door and let her out several blocks away. We posted reward signs all over the neighborhood to no avail (other than the one young person who brought us someone else’s cat and was disappointed we would not give him the reward for it). We had given up when we got the call, and there she was, at just about the point she was probably shoved out of the car. No homing instinct at all. The finders were adamant about getting the reward up front before they would tell us where she was. She had a respiratory ailment and required some expensive vet visits but was ultimately OK. The idiot visitor never offered an apology or to reimburse us.
More sadly, we had another cat (a rescue, not a purebred) who just wandered off one day and never returned. He was elderly and suffering from an ailment that required us to medicate him daily, so I’m sure he either gave himself a DNR order or was killed by a predator. Still pretty sad about it. However, we no longer allow any of our cats free access to the great outdoors unless they are closely accompanied by a human servant.
We had a mostly outdoor cat when I was a kid. He would wander the neighborhood a lot but was usually around. One day he left and we didnt see him for about a year. Then out of nowhere he just showed up at our house but he wasn’t alone. He brought his pregnant girlfriend with him! They lived together in our garage until the kittens were born and he helped her care for them until they were old enough to care for themselves.
Many years ago, I had two cats who were indoor/outdoor cats. One summer day, Maya didn’t show up for breakfast. We posted Missing Cat signs around the neighborhood, called the pound, walked the area, but nothing. Fall comes, then winter, and finally spring rolls around. I go out to call Ailey (the other cat) in for breakfast and in strolls Maya like she’d left two minutes before. She’d gained a LOT of weight, so I figured she must have been picked up by someone whose digs she preferred (or who didn’t let her out).
The following summer, Maya again disappears. She’s gone for three weeks, until one day, she shows up again. This time she’s LOST a lot of weight. She’d been locked in some old man’s shed for three weeks, without food and presumably water (no telling how she survived).
I’ve never let her out since.
My 8 year old cat went missing on July 5th, 1997…fireworks, probably. We searched and walked the neighborhood, but never found him. I’d like to think some family took him in, and nothing horrible actually happened to him. I know he would be 22 now and dead. He was an indoor/outdoor cat.
I have, or had, a cat who loved hunting and being outdoors. She would go away for weeks and come back fine. She was gone last summer for six weeks, showed up happy and healthy. So when she was missing a few weeks before Christmas I wasn’t too worried-- eventually, though, I decided to ask the neighbors if they’d seen a gray cat around. There really aren’t too many neighbors since we are in the country. No one had seen her, but then one neighbor said someone came to his door and asked if he had a gray cat, because he had just hit one in the road… it must have been her. But, maybe it was a different gray cat…
Our cat discovered a neighbor’s covered patio with an upholstered loveseat on it, and took up residence there. She enjoyed him and would leave bowls of kibble for him. So for a few weeks, he just lived there, until finally one day he decided to come back home. He will often go missing for two weeks at a time, and is presumably visiting neighbors who feed him.
Louie was the best, smartest cat I ever had - lived to 17 years and would have kept it up if his lungs had been willing. Anyway, he took off from a country rental house I was living in with a friend. After a few days, I posted signs in every store and church in the area, which was a good sized country mile or so. Lots of New England woodland and not much shelter. I kept up hope for about three months, until around the time when my dad kindly said “You know, it’s possible that he may not come back, you might have to get used to that idea.” This practically broke my heart, but I realized he was right.
A few weeks later, my landlord called me at work to tell me that a neighbor about 2 miles down the road had a black and white tuxedo cat in his barn, had been there for about a week. Did I have a picture of Louie he could use to identify him with?
A few hours later, I got home and there was my little bad boy, Louie, sitting in the kitchen, totally nonchalant as if four months hadn’t passed. He was clean, slim, and showed no sign of injury. He was a super smart cat, so I expect he was out cruising different farms and such. Dad and I always thought it would make a good children’s book to portray Louie’s adventure from his perspective.
What a dear boy…best cat I ever had, he’d follow me like a dog. When he got too sick to walk alongside me in the woods, he’d ride in the crook of my arm just to go along.
As a kid I had an indoor/outdoor cat who liked to roam far. Several times he disappeared for days/weeks. Sometimes he would come home of his own accord; other times we would cast a wider and wider net of lost cat posters until someone would see it, recognize the new addition to their family, and give us a call.
He was not impressed, the first time he was gone for weeks, to find that we had brought home another cat in his absence. Eventually they got along, but they never really resolved who “owned” the house.
Any of you have one that went away for over a year and came back? We saw Stinker standing in the middle of our kiddie pool, in a fairly deep puddle of rain water, drinking that same water. We called him, and he came in.
We had another cat who we think was our cat only every other day.
My ex found one of his cats camped out on the local farmer’s doorstep. He has since adopted the farm and only shows up at Bob’s 2-3 times a year.
My brother’s neighbor had a tom go missing for over two years. Then he showed up again minus his balls. It was easy to figure out what happened to him.
We had a cat who started disappearing for days at a time. Then longer. My sister recognized him one day hanging out on the front porch of a house at the end of the street (some 20+ houses down). I think it started because he’d go outside in winter and probably found shelter there and then the people started feeding him, etc.
Anyway, his absences went longer and longer until he apparently just transitioned into his new home and we started forwarding his mail. We’d drive by months later and still see him hanging out down the block. Never bothered to inform his new family that they had “our” cat.
Don’t get me wrong, we liked him well enough and he was well cared for but we already had several cats and his arrival in our home was fairly unexpected in the first place. Since we knew he was being fed and cared for – well enough to ditch us, in fact – we were content to just let it be.