Sophie is back.  What a huge relief.   In the 4+ years I’ve had her, she has never roamed away.  I guess I will never know how she made it as far as she did.
Here is how finding her happened.  At 2:17 am this morning, I received a call (which I didn’t hear or pick up). When I woke up I noticed the call and listened to the message. A guy named Joshua said he was outside smoking a cigarette and Sophie came out of the bushes, meowing at him.  He said he would keep her until he heard back from me.

I called him at 9am, it went to his voice mail.  I guess anyone up at 2:17am smoking a cigarette isn’t necessarily a morning person (not that 9am is early)..  Anyway, he called me back around noon, gave me his address, and I immediately hopped in the car to pick her up.  I was very surprised how far she had gotten.  She ended up a mile or so away from the house, in a slim-shady neighborhood, on a street next to the freeway.

I was soo happy to see her.  She was happy to see me.. we laughed, we cried..  When I got home, I locked the cat door so she couldn’t get out.  She was behaving very strangely, walking around the house with a loud yowl type meow.  She couldn’t/wouldn’t settle down.  She finally did, and the picture you see is her baby, the other cat, loving on her, taking care of her.  So cute.

But here is the thing. How did I find her?  Her collar and a good samaritan.  I have cloth collar with her name and my number sewn into the collar (so there are no tags).   Someone saw the number on her collar and called.  Its as simple as that.    Here is everything I did to find her:

• Collar – $15 about 2 years ago
• Craigslist.org – $0 to post a missing pet add
• SPCA – $0 – filed a missing pet report in person.  You also had to go back in-person to look for your pet.
• UPS Store – $35 – to make 50 color flyers to hang up all over the neighborhood.
• PetAmberAlert.com – $50 – First, it took them 24 hours to get a draft of a missing pet flyer to me.   The flyer they created was hideous so I changed it. Couldn’t do it online, I had to do it myself and then send them the pdf.   They posted it and send out the poster to neighboring businesses. However, they have yet to send me a list of everyone they sent the poster to…. Secondly, I have no way of marking my pet “found” and I have no idea what they do .. if anything, to alert people that the animal has been found.
• Findtoto.com – $85 – for them to call 500 people within a mile radius of me.  Again, these folks will not send me a list of folks they called.  One good note is that there is a way to mark your pet as “found” on this website.  This website is so much easier to use and their turn-around time is immediate.  May not have helped me find Sophie, but doing it felt good, I felt like I was doing something and that someone was out there wanting to help me (unlike PetAmberAlert.com).

I think the best thing to do for any pet at this point, is to have a collar with a phone number on it (vs. dangling tags), insert a chip into the cat (wish it had GPS capabilities so I can look online at her location when she goes missing), and make flyers ON YOUR OWN and hang them up around the neighborhood.   As far as finding a lost pet,  I would definitely not pay for PetAmberAlert.com again.   If Findtoto.com could offer some additional services (like the flyer/business alert service at PetAmberAlert), they would rock.  Overall, I dont feel I got much value of either site, and because they aren’t able to tell me exactly what they did, It feels like a scam.

O.k. thats it for me tonight.  The cats are home safe, the pet door is locked, and I’m am exhausted.   I have more to write about all sorts of things, but that will just have to wait until tomorrrow.