‘Charity gave my lost cat back to wrong family’
WHEN Marine Coucoulis discovered her cat Booba had been found more than four months after it went missing, she was delighted.
But her joy quickly turned to anguish when she was told Booba had been rehomed with another family – despite being fitted with a microchip that should have allowed Ms Coucoulis to be traced as the rightful owner.
Ms Coucoulis has accused the RSPCA of making too little effort to establish Booba’s rightful owner before the four-year-old animal was handed to someone else.
Booba went missing towards the end of March, but a few weeks later Ms Coucoulis read an old RSPCA posting on the Pets Located website. “When I asked when I could come and pick Booba up they told me he had already been given to a new family. How could that happen when he was microchipped? It was awful.”
Ms Coucoulis, a Frenchborn business analyst, was told Booba had been found just three streets from her home in Cricklewood, north London, before being handed to Cats Protection, the charity, for re-homing.
Ms Coucoulis claims that the RSPCA failed to make any serious attempt to trace the cat from the microchip details under which it was registered. The confusion arose because Booba was registered in France through a French animal database.
She claims both organisations failed to check with Europetnet, a Europe-wide database that collates details of where pets are registered.
An RSPCA spokesman said the organisation “actively searched for an owner by putting up posters, advertising him online and checking his microchip”. Cats Protection said it had no powers to force Booba’s new keepers to give him up.