30 months, 560 km: The incredible journey of Pharfalla the feline
A Central B.C. family will get an early Christmas gift Friday, when they are reunited with the plucky feline they lost more than two years ago.
Last week, when the weather was cold and snowy, a tortoiseshell cat turned up on a Surrey couple’s doorstep. They brought her inside, fed her and quickly became smitten. However, they wanted to make sure they weren’t keeping someone else’s pet, so they called the Surrey Animal Resource Centre.
Animal control picked up the cat and delivered it to the animal shelter, where staff found during an intake exam that the eightyear-old cat had been tagged with an identification microchip. They ran the chip, but it contained no local information.
“It got a little complicated,” said Kim Marosevich, operations manager of bylaws and licensing for the City of Surrey.
Staff investigated further and found that the microchip was Swiss. They got in touch with the company that made the chip and got contact information for a woman in the small Cariboo community of McLeese Lake.
When staff called the woman, they heard an amazing story.
It turned out that the cat, as a kitten, had been found in a wood pile in Germany in 2008. The woman who adopted the cat named her Pharfalla, nursed her back to health and moved to Switzerland with her. In 2013, Pharfalla and her owners flew from Switzerland to Calgary, via Seattle, and then drove to McLeese Lake.
In June 2014, Pharfalla disappeared without a trace and her family feared the worst — until she turned up in Surrey last week.
Shelter staff has no idea how Pharfalla made the 560-kilometre journey, but she is very friendly and in excellent condition, so they don’t believe she did it alone.
“There’s this gap between when she went missing in June to when she turned up here and nobody but Pharfalla knows what happened in between,” Marosevich said. “It’s just amazing.”
Her owners — passionate animal lovers who have multiple cats, dogs and horses — are planning to retrieve her Friday from the Surrey Animal Resource Centre.
“It’s very touching to have somebody 600 kilometres away, their cat’s been gone for 21/2 years, just overjoyed and willing to make the drive down to bring their cat back home,” Marosevich said. “In our work, we don’t always get that kind of happy ending. We don’t always get people who are committed to the lifetime care of their animals.”
Marosevich said this is an example of why it’s important to put permanent identification on your pets and make sure your contact information is up to date.
“We think the more identification an animal has, the better,” she said.