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Very recently this happened to one of our friends and you’d be amazed at how little information there is when you find a stray cat wandering around. Of course, you do need to understand there is a difference between stray cats and feral cats – strays are lost cats, cats that belong to a home and are probably sorely missed. A feral cat is one that has been born in the wild normally to one or two stray parents, and will be incredibly unapproachable. They have had very little human interaction and therefore tend to be rather vicious.
Contact Your Local Vets
If you are sure the little kitty you have found is a stray (for example, it has a collar on or is approachable to some extent), you need to take steps to try and find the original owner.
One of the best things you can do is to contact your local Cats Protection League or a Vet where they will be able to scan the furry creature to find out whether or not it has been microchipped. This is why it is very important to have your animals chipped – if they ever get out (which they often do) they can easily be returned! Think of it like a virtual collar.
Keep The Cat Safe In A Box Or Cat Carrier
This is easier said than done when you can’t catch the stray cat. If you don’t have a cat box to hand, it’s well worth asking a couple of houses along the road you have found the her. Firstly, she may belong to one of those households and secondly, one of them may have a cat box you can borrow for a little while to safely transport the animal to the vet.
If no cat box is to hand, you’ll find a large blanket is handy to capture the scared little thing, and a large (ish) cardboard box will provide a relatively safe home for a while until you can get something more definite sorted.
Use Social Media!
Thankfully, our friend posted a site on her local area group on Facebook and found the owner, and you’ll be amazed at how many lost pets are returned in this manner. She very smartly wrote a post without a photo to the page so that the owner could describe the pet (and provide an actual photograph they had taken of the cat) to claim her. If you put a photo up there, anyone could claim the animal and you don’t want that – you want them safely returned to their rightful owner.
At the same time, another friend managed to find a local woman on these Facebook pages that had a microchip scanner to pop around. The kitty that she found was sadly not microchipped.
Look To Rehome The Cat (Or Keep It Yourself!)
In the cases that the cat doesn’t have a collar and isn’t microchipped, you can do what our second friend did and re-home her. She tried for about three weeks to find the owner of the animal and to no avail. She also called a couple of vet’s to find out the best course of action and because she was happy to take care of the animal and keep her warm, dry and fed for a few weeks, they advised her to keep her until she had either found the owner, or decided to keep her… which she did. She is now named Choo-Cat and is very happy in her new home!
You can always take the animal to a local cat and dog shelter if you can’t keep it at your house. The thing with this is that there will normally be many cats in the shelter waiting to be re-homed so if there is a chance you can re-home the poor little thing yourself, and are sure that the owner will not come forward for it, or you can keep it safe, the shelter will normally advise you to do that instead.
Adam & Laura
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Photo by Arvind Balaraman