My cat is gone. He shot out of the house on Tuesday night at 7 pm as we came in, and hasn’t been seen since.
I know, I know, I know all about outside cats having a much shorter life expectancy, and all of the horrible things that can befall them out there. But, we live in the country. And he loves(d?) being outside so, so much- I always said that if you asked him if he would rather live a longer life but have to stay in the house, or live a shorter life but be able to go outside, he’d pick the second. It made him happy.
I’ve checked the Humane Society’s lost and found online section, as well as craigslist. I don’t really know what else to do except put up my own ad, which I will do tomorrow if he’s not back yet.
I’m sad. I love that cat. He’s only 2 and a half. I haven’t had nearly enough time with him. His name is Toby but I mostly just call him Kitty.
Tell me all about that time your beloved kitty got or went out and was gone for days! and then he came home and all was well and maybe it’ll make me feel better.
I had a lovely long haired black cat named Merlin. When we got him he lived in student housing, and cats were verboten. He learned at a young age to run and hide when the doorbell rang, and he was skittish around strangers until he had a chance to thoroughly inspect them from a safe distance.
Comes the day that my mother-in-law left the backdoor wide open, and the cats got out. 2 were easily retrieved, one being blind, and the other perfectly content to sun herself by the door and come when called. Merlin was gone, however. I did lots of research on where cats go when they disappear, and the answer is that usually they are within in few hundred yards of home. So I started scouting everywhere he could possibly be hiding. I checked woodpiles, searched neighbors garages. I finally caught sight of him skulking about in my next door neighbor’s driveway. He would not come when I called him. (Scary world!) I eventually caught him by putting out canned food. I started where I had seen him, then moved the food 10 feet closer to home every night. Eventually he was coming in and out of my garage to get the food. I was able to catch him from there.
What from this might apply to you? Look around your house. He’s unlikely to have gone far. Try leaving canned food out in a few likely spots. Is there a barn or woodpile where he might have gone if he got scared or hurt? You might get raccoons or something else, but you also might lure him out.
Assuming the best and he comes home again, you might try a “home when dark” policy. (Food bribes and mean door shutting required).
I don’t think he’s around home- although there are a lot of places he could hole up around here, he’s master of his domain; he’s used to being outside and feels very comfortable going in and out. The only reason he’d be hiding out around here is if he’s hurt, but I’ve looked and called all over here and haven’t found him.
I always have fed him his favorite- canned food- at 10 pm, just because I knew he’d come home at night for that, and then he’d be in for the night, at least until he’d start pitching a fit to get out at 5 or 6 am. That worked every night up until Tuesday.
So sorry about your little one - he’s a real cutie-pie! Have you thought about posting pics at local vets and pet stores? ddsun is right - I think most cats never go far from the house when they get out.
One day my own kitty ran out the door. We spent a whole day and night in the rain and fog looking for him. We finally gave up after midnight, and decided to go back out in the morning. As soon as we opened the door, he shot in like a rocket, right to his litter box! The boob had the whole world as his litter box, but he held it in just to use his own.
He couldn’t have been that far from the house, and although we called him for hours, he wouldn’t respond.
Please don’t give up hope.
Hugs and scritches,
Wallet
My Big Orange Cat, Bitty Brat, was an indoor cat his entire life, terrified of the outside world. I was home on leave for Christmas which was about 3 months after my then wife moved back home. His sire, Rug Rat, died of a broken heart 3 days before I got home and Bitty escaped the day I flew back when my roomie went inside. He totally disappeared for about 2 weeks and refused to come back in for about a month. I guess he had to go find himself and his place in the new scheme of his world, because after that little adventure he was no longer Evil Incarnate and was from then until his last days a total Lover of All.
Toby Kitty is a most Handsome Gentleman Adventurer.
If you want to catch the cat, you can always bait a Hav-A-Heart trap with jack mackerel or tuna fish. Set it up at night and drape the trap with towels over the top so it looks like a cozy safe haven. When my indoor-only cat escaped, we got him back the first night we tried this method.
He was out in the snow alone for 8 days. He came back emaciated but very happy to see his family.
Is your cat not good about coming back after going out? When my sister let her cats out, they often got bolder and bolder about roaming farther and being gone longer. She would cruise the neighborhood with cat treats looking for them.
About ten years ago we lived in a little terrace house with our middle aged kitty cat, whose official name was Coco, but unofficially the Evil Black Monster Cat, or EBMC. In theory she was an indoor outdoor cat, but since "outdoors " consisted of a 4m square courtyard with eight foot brick fences, her range was not wide.
We didn’t really have a set in stone feeding time, but she’d come and bug us when she wanted dinner. One evening it got quite late and, “hey, did you feed the Monster Cat this evening?” “Uh, no, didn’t YOU feed …?” We scoured the house and yard - no kitty cat. After some thought we realised that earlier in the day there’d been workmen about and the back gate had, unusually, been opened. She must have wandered into the alley, and been unable to jump back once the gate was shut. So we opened up the gate again and went up and down the alley, dinging the cat food ton. No luck. We went sadly to bed.
Later that evening, a lady about four doors down had the following experience:
hmm… Having a nice sleep … thump … What was… Oh yeah just the cat jumping onto my … WAIT A MINUTE! I don’t HAVE a cat! *
What she did have, was a cat door cut in her back fence, and another in the back door. Unlike us.
Kitty cat was tagged, so three days later when the Wheels Of Bureaucracy had turned, we got a call from council. The EBMC lived another ten happy years with us and finally expired in her sleep about 2 months ago, at the ripe old age of nineteen.
I’ve had cats that came home and cats that didn’t, but mostly they did.
When we moved in here we found out that, in between the previous residents vacating and us taking possession, a cat had gotten locked in one of our storage outbuildings. For possibly up to three weeks (I think it was less). That cat headed out like a rocket; it turned out to belong to the woman across the street, who was very glad to have him back.
The weird thing was that he looked a lot like one of our cats, a tuxedo cat, but he was easily twice her size.
We learned about it when we thought we’d lost our tuxedo cat. Actually we thought we’d lost them both, which was strange, since as we’d just moved we were keeping them both inside, and tuxedo cat never went outside anyway. It turned out they had just found very good hiding places inside the house. Very good places.
Anyway, if there are garages/outbuildings around, consider your kitty may have wandered in, and will come out when they’re opened. If there are such buildings around not likely to be opened soon, you might hang around them to see if you hear meowing.
Good luck, hope he comes home.
ETA: See if you hear meowing? :smack: You know what I mean.
I had a cat come back after more than a year. Sort of. He ran off and we had no idea what became of him. A year+ later the vet called me and gave me the number of a person that said they had my cat. They got the vets number from the rabies tag on the collar. I went over to get him, the people had only had him for a day or two. No idea where he had been but he was fat and clean. I took him home and he acted just like he’d never been gone. He remembered exactly where the food dish and litter box were. The other cat remembered him as well.
I had a dedicated house cat that got stepped out on the stoop one day as a got the mail. Didn’t realize she was gone. The next day I was mowing the lawn and hit her with the mower. She was all balled up next to the garage. She was not amused. I had to suck up to her like I did after returning from vacation every year.
True outdoor cats can stay out for days before returning.
My Rpcky got out one day (he was an indoor cat) and vanished. I looked everywhere and finally put up flyers at the animal shelter and on the street. A week after he left I heard his mew outside the back door at 5 am and there he was. I’m pretty sure someone had taken him in as he was fed and clean. I think he escaped from them when he could.
Best part of the whole adventure was the look on his brother Max’s face. I said “look who is home” and Max’s face said “oh shit, I thought we’d finally got rid of him.” Anyway I hope your guy comes home.
These are making me feel a little bit better but I’m still gloomy. He’s very friendly to everyone, even strangers, so I hope he’s just temporarily adopted someone nice.
We had a ginger cat we called Columbus that we’d adopted as a kitten. He lived with us for three years and one day he darted out the door and was gone. He’d never tried to escape before, so we were terrified he’d get hit in the street, being naive to traffic. We searched for him for days, put up fliers, visited shelters, the whole nine yards. About six months later he showed up, scratching at the front door. He looked good and seemed fit. He stayed with us for about a year, then disappeared again. Again, months went by and no Columbus. One day my younger son attended a birthday party at a schoolmate’s house and there was a ginger cat that looked just like Columbus. The cat ran right over to him and seemed pleased to see him, wanting pets and attention. When I picked my son up after the birthday party, the cat came right up to me for attention, too. I scritched behind his ears and found a scar behind his right ear, just as Columby had as a result of a dust up with our other cat. I talked a bit to the mother and found that Columby’s ‘disappearances’ synced up with the times ‘their’ cat had been in their home. Turns out we were sharing a cat!
Not long after that, the family moved out of town. It was during the time Columby was staying with them and they took him along. I was sad that they hadn’t even asked us, knowing our ‘joint custody’ situation. But at least I knew he was well loved and cared for where he was.
You never know with cats. They make life decisions, often wise ones, in ways that we human can’t comprehend.
a) When I was 16 our ~4 year old cat, who was an indoor-outdoor cat who roamed at will, didn’t show up for dinner or breakfast, and this became quite out of the ordinary at the 3 day mark. He was gone for a month and a half and we were mourning him sadly when one day there he was, scratching at the door to be let in, apparently well fed and not fully of horrible wounds and scratches. No idea what he’d been up to.
b) We had a housemate in 2012 who arrived from upstate NY with two older cats. One dashed off almost immediately and we all figured if she didn’t find her way home very soon it wouldn’t happen since the cats had not had any time to become accustomed to their new habitat. But a month later the woman said “Stop the car, stop the car” and hopped out on a suburban street about 4 blocks from our house — yep, it was her missing cat, and she walked home from there with the cat following.
c) Not to be outdone, her OTHER cat then went AWOL about 2 weeks later. This was a cat not anywhere near as self-sufficient or as inclined to go out at all, but he’d gone out and not returned as he usually did. Bit on the stupid side, this one, and I figured he’d gotten his self run over. Five weeks later he came miaowing at the door to be let in. We decided he got jealous of the other one’s adventures and decided to forth on a kitty Odyssey of his own.
Not mine, but my friend’s cat was missing for over two weeks! Friend posted to Facebook, both as a status on her personal page and to missing pet groups; she posted signs around the neighborhood; she dropped by animal shelters; she posted to community forums, the whole nine. After weeks, a stranger on Facebook messaged her to say a neighbor had found a lost cat and was looking for its owner. That neighbor was blocks from my friend, and boom, kitty found.
Our old outdoor cat Fluffernutter went missing for over 9 weeks in our very rural neighborhood, in the middle of a harsh winter, and turned up one day, skinny as a rail, cool as a cucumber, to live on for years.
Do you have a local FB pets page? Around here that’s how most lost pets are found. Everybody shares the post, and then those share it, and so on. I’ve seen probably 60 such posts and I would say at least 50 were found. (I follow up).
Check any place that can be closed up. Garages, sheds, outbuildings, basements, etc. I’ve had several cats disappear–then reappear–only to have been locked inside somewhere other than home.
All of mine are now inside cats, that reason being one.
