Safely Home: Heading Back To The Family Farm

Scamp is 13 years old. He was my father’s cat and grew up on a large farm. When my father died, Scamp came to live with us and our dogs, several states away from the family farm. Scamp and his brother Pounce, who died a year earlier from a rattlesnake bite, had been raised with dogs, so being around our dogs was not an issue. We had Scamp chipped and kept him in the house for about two weeks. We use a dog door for our other pets so, after the two weeks, we re-opened the dog door and Scamp settled into his normal routine as an indoor/outdoor cat fairly quickly.

After about seven weeks of normal routine, Scamp went missing. We listed him as lost on the PetLink website and visited all the animal shelters in the area several times. Scamp had completely disappeared. A month after he went missing, we gave up and believed something bad had happened to him.
A little over a year after Scamp disappeared, we received a phone call from a vet’s office near our home. They said they had Scamp and wanted to know if we wanted him back! When we picked him up, we found out he had been with a family about six miles away from our house for a whole year. While living there, Scamp had become sick with pneumonia and the family took him to the vet’s office, passing right by our house and going three miles in the other direction.
The vet scanned him as part of the visit and found the chip so the family that had been keeping him left Scamp for us to pick up. We took him to our regular vet for treatment and he healed up very quickly. We now have Scamp restricted to inside the house until we relocate next year to our family property, which is the farm where he grew up. He has been having some issues with being a full-time inside cat but we are managing, knowing it will be over in a few more months and Scamp can roam free.