And the cat came home! (Tips for finding lost animals)

Yesterday, a neighbour from another road sent out an alert for his missing tom-cat, Whisky. Whisky had been missing for four days. So I shared whatever I knew. Besides the usual methods of alerting the neighbourhood chatgroup, leaving flyers at mailboxes, pet stores, vet clinics, coffee shops, etc., posting the alert on Facebook, petfinder.my and other social media platforms, there are also the following:

1. The Japanese Method
2. The Chinese Method
3. The telepathic method
4. Get help from animal communicators
5. Leave a trail leading home (for dogs)

The Japanese Method is to talk to street cats and ask them to help look for your missing cat/dog and get the cat/dog to return home. Cats can be very helpful creatures IF they want to help you! Street cats go everywhere so they might just be able to locate your missing pet. Here’s more: https://soranews24.com/2019/05/11/how-to-find-a-lost-cat-unique-method-from-japan-proves-to-be-surprisingly-effective/. I have done this before.

The Chinese Method goes like this and you may or may not want to indulge in it because it’s enlisting the Kitchen God for assistance. Boil a pot of water on your stove and place a pair of open scissors on top of the pot. Then, ask the Kitchen God to help guide your pet home. The Kitchen God is a Chinese cultural deity, Zao Shen (literally “god of the hearth”), who reports to the celestial gods on the family’s conduct and is believed to have powers to bestow blessings to the family. This is purely cultural, not religious. I have also done this before when I was really desperate!

The telepathic method is to send messages to your missing pet and ask him/her to return home. Also, visualise the road/route home for your pet. Animals may be able to receive such messages from us because of the bond we share with them. I always do this whenever any pet goes missing and has not returned home when he/she is supposed to.

Getting help from animal communicators: Some are able to tell you where your pet is, with descriptions of their location. Some can communicate with your pet and tell you how your pet is feeling and why he/she has gone way from home. Some can even tell you roughly when your pet wishes to return home. I have done this before too. Ginger was lost a few years ago and it was getting to be almost a full day. The animal communicator said Ginger was in a place with a lot of construction material. We went to search at the nearby LRT construction area but failed to find him. Ginger did come home at midnight and later, whenever he went missing, we would find him on the neighbour’s roof where there were construction material or in the drains where the neighbour keeps piles of tiles (construction material)! Daffodil, towards the end of her life, went away from home. We could see her but she just simply refused to come home. The animal communicator said Daffodil just wanted to explore her surroundings for awhile and will eventually come home when she is ready to do so. Daffodil came home, after 3 days, sat at the garbage compartment and allowed me to carry her back into the house. The animal communicator only took her fee after Daffodil returned. Many of my friends have their own stories too. I have more stories too, but that would have to be another day!

For dogs, we have another method, leave a trail of the dog’s favourite belongings or your own belongings like your tshirts, leading the way back home. I did not know this earlier, though. When Bobby went missing in our old neighbourhood, I went searching for him and found him running like a horse (on panic mode, which happens to dogs). He saw me, but he just kept running. Finally, after trying for a few hours, I went back home, opened the gate wide and waited (of course I sent telepathic messages to him too). Bobby came back on his own after 7 hours. He was an old dog then and he was already blind. While looking for him, a distant neighbour said he saw Bobby at the oxidation pond which was very, very far away from our house, a place I had never taken him to before in our walks. How Bobby eventually came back, I do not know. But he did. That was one of the most challenging 7 hours of my life.

Okay, now back to Whisky. Believe it or not, Whisky came back home last night!! I have urged his parent to please consider getting Whisky neutered so that he would have less desire to roam. Most importantly, so that he will not impregnate other female felines in the neighbourhood.

And I had actually shared all my methods with this neighbour in 2020 when another one of his cats went missing. This cat came back too! And he wrote about it here: https://www.free2share.com/a-true-cats-tale/

Believe it or not, there was once when Heidi actually lost her way after our taiji session at the park (Heidi accompanied us for all our taiji practices at the park), she had wandered off and had gone “back home” to another house which was 180 degrees off from our house. We went searching for her all over the neighbourhood and found her peeking out from that other house’s gate! At that time, Heidi had just adopted us, so we weren’t sure if that was her real home (Heidi came as an elderly cat and she was already spayed too). So we rang the doorbell and asked the pakcik and he said no, Heidi isn’t his cat. So Heidi came home with us!