And the cat came back the very next day

And the Cat Came Back - Harry S. Miller

We live in a house of dogs.   Not that we have a ton of dogs, in fact, the dog we have now sits on the borderline in the dog-cat spectrum, but we identify as a dog household rather than cat.  In fact you could say that some in the household are 'anti-cat'.     This tendency is reinforced by mild cat allergies in my girls and the fact that we already have a cat chasing dog in the house.

So, where is this all going?    One late night as my daughter was walking home from work she called and said she had a problem.  Ok, that could be anything so I braced myself.     The problem is that a small cat had been following her home for a number of blocks, randomly darting out into the roadway in the process.     I told her to keep walking and ignore it and see what happens when she got home.    She tried to ignore it and walk it back but eventually, the two of the arrived at our door.   My thoughts were that it could sleep outside with a dish of milk and a blanket but at midnight I wasn't wanting to negotiate or reason with my daughter with that idea.   So, in my new version of parenting teens I left it to her - 'What should I do?'  My response:  'You decide'.     So, my daughter decided to keep the cat in her room for the night and then source out the owner in the morning.

I left her on her own the following morning to find the rightful home for the feline and checked in with her later in the day with the provision that it would NOT be spending another night in the house.   By the end of the day she had looked for identifiable tattoos or chip implants and found none but decided to have it checked out by the nearby vet.   They found a chip and also confirmed that not only was the cat fairly young but it had been recently spade and was still healing from the surgery.    The vet researched the chip and identified that it was registered in - get this - Taiwan.  Before you take your mind the same route mine did namely, how did this animal get across the ocean, the story makes sense in the end.  Due to the time change, they wouldn't be able to get any info on the registered owner until the next day.   She found a friend who would take the cat for the night thereby meeting my requirements that it not be in our house and also relieving her of the ever increasing allergic reaction she was having.   The cat was gone for the night but, as the song goes, the cat came back the very next day.  

In the end, the owner was identified as someone living along her route from work to home.   Apparently Taiwan is a common place for cat rescue and that's where this one originated.  Although sounding bizarre at the time, in the end, it all made sense.   It was a good lesson for my daughter, learning to make a decision, live with it and carry it through to the end.  It also prompted her to fully clean her room to get rid of any 'essence of cat' that might remain.   That in itself was worth a few days with a feline.

Now, if it had been a puppy....that's another story.