BY GREG SAKAKI
A cat visiting from Ontario that was lost at a Vancouver Island shopping centre was found safe and is now making its way home.
A senior from Orillia, Ont., who was recently widowed, decided to drive across the country last month as it was something she and her husband had always talked about but had never gotten around to doing. She made it all the way to Nanaimo, but while making a few stops at Port Place mall on Sept. 14, she realized she had lost her cat, Chloe.
The woman slept in her car that night at the mall parking lot, hoping her cat would return. The following day, while searching, the senior tripped and fell on her face, badly enough that she had to be taken to Nanaimo Regional General Hospital. Staff there helped her print off some lost cat posters, and for four days, black-eyed and limping, she continued to search downtown with the help of Nanaimo CatNap Society volunteer Kathi Baart.
Eventually, the senior decided she couldn’t stay any longer and made the drive back across the country.
“She cried the whole way home,” Baart said.
CatNap volunteers, however, put up colour posters and kept looking, and their perseverance paid off Thursday, Oct. 5. A woman experiencing homelessness heard the cat in the engine compartment of an excavator parked near the TD Bank, enlisted the help of city workers to retrieve the animal, and Baart got there as quick as she could with a cat carrier.
Coincidentally, another CatNap volunteer has business in Ontario this week and will hardly need to go out of her way at all to drop off Chloe with at her owner’s home in Orillia this Thursday, Oct 12.
“Isn’t that a beautiful story?” asked Baart. “Talk about the universe coming together and being there with every little thing that we needed to get her home safe.”
The story was shared on Facebook over the weekend and Baart said people commented that it warmed their heart and made their Thanksgiving weekend.
“It’s just been wonderful, the response from everybody that was out there looking for her and rooting for her, and to finally find her was just like finding a needle in a haystack, honestly,” Baart said. “It’s an incredible journey this cat’s been on and I’m just so happy that she’s got a good ending.”
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