HAVE YOU LOST A COMPANION ANIMAL?

NEVER GIVE UP -- TWO STORIES OF HOPE

BY ANNE MULLER

IT CAN TAKE WEEKS, MONTHS, OR EVEN
YEARS,

BUT FINDING THEM
CAN AND DOES HAPPEN

http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local-beat/Money-Is-No-Object-in-Search-For-Missing-Pooch-72612147.html?yhp=1

This article caught my attention and came as another reminder that no matter how bleak the situation looks, you mustn't give up.

I recently read about a man
who had left his dog, Casey
(photo above) with a pet sitter for
a week. While he was
gone, Casey jumped a four-foot fence
and took off running. After a diligent
search a week later, she was found
hanging around someone's home who
had been feeding her. "She went crazy when she saw me," her human guardian said. "She was whining with joy for about a half an hour." So was he, no doubt!

I was reminded of my own experience: Several years ago I had some furniture removed from my house, and later that evening discovered that one of our very skittish and semi-feral cats had gotten out of the house during the commotion. I could only think that he had been hiding inside the sofa that had been taken to a landfill. We drove hours to the various landfills to find our sofa and check inside, but we met with no luck at all. For months, I imagined my poor, frightened boy freezing, starving and huddled inside of the sofa springs. I imagined the sofa hoisted in the air by trucks, then dropped and smashed into bits and buried. Not good!

Photo of BeeBee - left with the elfin face - his brother, Bee, right.

After our landfill search yielded nothing, I began to post everywhere in our neighborhood thinking he might have jumped from the truck prior to being hauled away. I didn't really believe that scenario, but was willing to try anything. The first round of fliers brought a couple of calls, and we followed those leads without success. He had been gone for two months and a bitter cold winter had set in. The howling snow storms buried my hope of finding my boy alive. I called my old friend, Ellie, to commiserate with her because the last time we'd talked she was grieving over a lost cat. I was the one who had turned her on to cats many years before. I got her to adopt just one little black cat named Toby, and left her with the comment that went something like this, "How would you like to never interact with another member of your own species?" That comment led her to pick up six more cats from the street. She was then the only member of her species in her house. Anyway, when Ellie answered the phone, she told me that she had
gotten her cat back after TWO YEARS of trying,
and the cat was purring happily next to her
at that moment!!! "Post again," she told me. I did. Not too many days later, a neighbor reported that he had seen a cat fitting BeeBee's description. He said he was hanging out with a few "little old lady cats" in back of his house. You guessed right, it was indeed BeeBee!!!!!! He had been living within 1,000 feet of my house. Through the brutal weather, he had wood piles that were covered with tarps to sleep and hide in, and hot potatoes that my neighbor fed the cats outside. So he was taken good care of by the other cats, my neighbor, and whatever name you want to give to the healing force of the universe. No, never give up!