Safely Home: Twice Saved By Microchip

My cat Laka went missing. She didn’t have a collar and got lost in a congested beach area of Hawaii. It’s a small city close to the water. There are a lot of people living there, so I put up flyers everywhere hoping somebody recognized her picture.

She was gone for nearly three weeks and I gave up hope. She could be lost anywhere.
That’s when I got a call that someone who had seen the flyer had Laka. I went to their home and what I saw was a distraught, dirty cat who was so scared it hid under the furniture. I didn’t recognize her and left in tears saying “This isn’t my cat”.

But these lovely people wouldn’t give up. They lived three miles away from where I live and they don’t know me or my cat. But they studied Laka’s face in the good color picture on the flyer and were sure I had made a mistake. So they said “Let’s take the cat to see if it’s chipped”. When the scan showed us the cat was my Laka it was unbelievable! It was a case of mistaken identity. I felt like an idiot but strange things happen. After a total of three weeks lost in mud and stormy weather, Laka had got so thin and dirty that even I didn’t know who she was. Laka was a beautiful, striking cat and I had her 12 years. The stress of getting lost didn’t just change her looks. She likes to talk a lot but after all that time in tremendous thunder and lightning she almost totally lost her voice.

Laka has always been an indoor/outdoor cat and when she took off she’d never done that before. We moved to a new area where there are a lot of stray cats and that’s why I got a microchip. I am very thankful that I did that. PetLink is a great system. The condition she was in made her look like a stray, but the angels were determined to reunite me with her. The woman who took her in said she would only eat tuna when a feral cat would eat anything. It made her even more sure Laka was the cat in the photo.