Moggie returns after a year of misadventure
Everyone has a cat-goeswalkabout story.
Sometimes they end badly, sometimes they don’t end at all the family moggie just disappears, never to be seen again, dead or alive - and sometimes they come home after months or years away.
In the case of the Collings family of Taihape, it was a couple of weeks short of a year before they caught up with Cleo the siamese after she apparently wandered off into the wild blue yonder in February last year.
They don’t know for sure but suspect it might not have been so much a case of wandering off, but rather hitching a ride in a visiting ute, driven by Mike Collings’ brother.
Last year was a tough year for the family of five, with their newborn little boy ailing and needing treatment in Wellington, so the call from a neighbour about a photo of a cat they’d seen on a Facebook post was a welcome break.
The neighbour thought the cat in the picture looked a lot like Cleo so they tipped off the Collings about it.
Sure enough it was the 4-yearold cat, who was promptly reunited with the family when they returned from Wellington and she has stayed put since.
It appears Cleo had been hanging out with people ‘‘up the hill on the other side of town’’, as Collings put it, three or so kilometres away.
She was a bit timid so didn’t venture inside anyone’s home but was well enough fed by residents who took a shine to her.
‘‘We presumed she was dead when we couldn’t find her,’’ said Collings after the family had walked the streets of their Takahe St neighbourhood in search of Cleo in the months after she did a bunk.
She would have spent some cold winter months in the great
‘‘We presumed she was dead when we couldn't find her.’’ Mike Collings
outdoors while on her adventure unless she found a handly shed or some such shelter in which to curl up.
Ironically it seems Cleo was at one point being fed dog roll by a woman who bought the pet food from Farmlands, where Collings works as business manager.
Veterinarian Malcolm Anderson said cats had ‘‘natural boundaries’’ of up to 3km, which often accounted for them disappearing for short and sometimes long periods of time.