14/09/2024
*****REUNITED*****
"Our Story of the losing and finding of Billy
Billy is an inside-only, lilac Burmese cat. He is one of three siblings, with brother Ferdi and sister Elsie. On 11 September, just after 11 am, I arrived home with my middle son to find my husband and eldest walking around the yard calling for Billy - he’d been missing for about 40 minutes after my husband forgot to lock the back door and Ferdi (who is a chronic door opener) jumped up, hung off the lever handle and swung the back door open.
I got the family members who were home to walk around the whole block (side and behind neighbours) calling him and tapping his food bowl while I first made a document with his details, my number and his photo on it. I printed out about 10 copies for power poles around our block and also made scaled down posters in A6 size for letter-box flyers - putting four in an A4 document and printing and chopping them up so I had more than 50 flyers. This was the step that reunited us with Billy - getting these small flyers to all homes in the local area quickly!
One of my biggest fears was that he had been catnapped as he’s a beautiful lilac Burmese who is super smoochy and sweet. I read a story recently about pedigree cats being stolen a few suburbs away. We are a family of cat-obsessed people, so we were all really stressed and worried about our boy.
By the time my husband put up the posters and I started door knocking, Billy had been missing almost an hour. While my husband and two of my sons kept calling him from the back yard and around the street, I door-knocked all homes around our block (back and front) and gave the neighbours the A6 flyers with Billy’s picture and my mobile number, putting the flyer into the letterbox of anyone who was not home. In the meantime, my sister signed up to your service so we would know what to do if we couldn’t find him straight away and also phoned local vets, our council and the RSPCA.
Around 4 hours after he went missing, I had to drive and collect my third son from school. As we were returning home, I got a phone call from an unknown number - it was a lady who lived at a house right around the corner from our street and who had not been home earlier when I door knocked. She had gotten the flyer and told me that there was a cat at her front window who looked like our missing Billy and he was still there!
We drove straight there and also rang my husband to walk around to the address in case Billy left her property from that side. When we arrived, our poor, frightened Billy was standing on his back legs with his front paws on her flyscreen door and the lovely lady who phoned me was talking to him quietly through the door. She hadn’t tried to grab him as I told her he would be very scared. We walked up and, hearing steps, he darted into the bushes outside her window. When he heard me calling him, he stuck his head out and I picked him up and promptly burst into tears! My husband and eldest son arrived and carried Billy home while I thanked the lovely lady. She told me Billy had seen her cat int he window and had been standing at the window meowing to it. When we got home he darted to the litter box and relieved himself… we think he’d found a house with a cat in it and was trying to ask her to let him in to p*e as he didn’t realise he could do it outside 🤣.
After looking around and calling for him, I felt it was important to get flyers and posters out straight away so our neighbourhood could help us find our boy as he hadn’t been missing that long and we knew he would be scared - and I’m so grateful that’s the process we took as it got our boy home to us quickly. Without the little flyer in her home, the lady wouldn’t have thought twice about a cat at her window or had my number to call - she would have frightened him off if she’d gone out to find my number on a poster. Our search for Billy took 4.5 hours, with my husband and I both having to take half days off work, our eldest missed his uni classes that afternoon, and our middle boy missed the appointment I’d come home to take him to and he didn’t get back to school after… but we were all just soooooo happy to have our sweet boy home where he got extra cuddles and attention. "
*********** REUNITED ***********
Thank you all so much for sharing and commenting! :D
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