Strategies and Insights for Finding Your Lost Cat

Welcome to the Starlight Pet Talk podcast, where we'll talk about and explore ways to help pet parents and future pet parents learn everything they need to know to have a happy and healthy relationship with their pet. So sit up and stay for Starlight Pet Talk rescue, adoption and pet parenting done right.

Welcome to Starlight Pet Talk. I'm your host, amy Castro, and whether your cat is a Houdini who's always trying to, and maybe succeeding in, escaping outdoors, or simply one of those ones like mine that are great at hiding anytime the carrier comes out and we're getting ready to go to the vet, you've probably experienced that panic when you're just not able to find your cat, no matter how much you feel like. You've looked around and, sadly, every year in the United States more than 10 million pets are lost and unfortunately, only about 65% of them are ever found. And I think when it comes to cats in particular, the odds of them being found are probably significantly lower than dogs. So my guest today is here to share how she helps people beat those odds and get their beloved cats back home. As a professional lost cat finder, kim Freeman has 10 years of experience finding cats with the scars on her knees to prove it, combining missing persons profiling with tracking, bird language and the science of lost cat behavior. She's been deemed the world expert in lost cat recovery and this was so surprising to me Solving cases in 48 states and 23 countries, which is just amazing to me. Her mission is getting cats found before they end up in shelters, and she's even created resources for pet parents, which we're going to talk about in more detail as we get into the show, where she shares her scientific methods to improve owner success and reduce shelter intake. So, kim, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show. You bet.

Thank you for the intro.

Yeah, so I know. I first heard about you when I attended a conference called Texas Unites for Animals, and I was just fascinated by the fact that, number one there was such a thing as a cat detective. How did you get started being a cat detective?

Well, my cat went missing and I learned firsthand what it feels like and the panic you feel, the stress and the stupid advice you get. At the time I was just taking any and all advice I could. Luckily I was able to get him found and that kind of inspired me to teach others what actually works instead of what doesn't work. Henry's my. He was my motivation for doing this professionally, yep.

Yeah, sometimes it starts off like that and you're like, hey, this worked well for me and I learned from this experience. What can I do to share that with other people? And it's funny you say about the bad advice you got, because as a rescue person, I spend a lot of time trolling social media looking for animals that we can help and almost every single day I come across at least a couple of posts related to people losing their pets and then people commenting giving lots of advice for finding them. That, I'm pretty sure, may not be the best advice and it's kind of sad that people are looking to just some random person in their neighborhood who really doesn't know what they're doing. But what are some of the mistakes that people make when they're trying to find a lost cat?

Well, the first thing is people panic, and that's obvious, right, that's understandable, but it's so important to stay calm and think about what you're doing instead of just trying to scramble around doing everything. The big mistakes I see are people following these internet myths and memes. The worst offender, in my opinion, is the litter box.

I see that a lot.

If your pets ever lost, put out the litter box and they can smell it from a mile away. There are so many problems with the litter box. First of all, this is to me the classic example of a superstition. It's circumstantial evidence that's believed because of the extenuating circumstances. So some cats have come home when there was a litter box outside the door, but it was in spite of the litter box, not because of it. So studies have shown a sack of potatoes would have worked just as well. But yeah, the litter box can be very counterproductive. Cats bury their poop for a reason they don't want to announce their presence to predators and all the other critters around. So when you put it out on display, you're inviting in all the neighborhood cats who think it's their territory and they're going to come and chase your cat away or beat him up because they think what are you doing in my territory. Or you're inviting in raccoons who will come eat the poop, as well as coyotes. They are real interested in cat poop, just like a dog eats the cat poop out of the litter box. Yeah coyotes will gladly do that. So it's really you're issuing an invitation for critters you don't want in your cat's safe zone.

Yeah, definitely don't need to lure predators to the yard with the litter box. Exactly. So that's one big one. So no more putting the litter box outside.

Right, you know I tell people home smells more like home than a litter box. The second one is food. You're doing the same thing with food. You're inviting in all the critters and stressed out. Cats are not that food motivated. They're more focused on safety. Food is not at the top of their list, so it's more important to give them a safe hiding spot, an open window, so the smell of home is drifting out. You need to think like a cat Instead of a freaked out human. You need to think like a cat. The same goes for walking around shaking treats. This is another mistake. I see so wandering the neighborhood far and wide streets and walks away. I've done it I admit. Well, I mean because that's what humans think of, right, and it's kind of a dog mentality search, Because sometimes a dog will come running if they hear your voice, but a cat is more likely if they even come out to following you from a distance. They could be like three yards behind you running from bush to under the car to bush and they're trailing you, but they're way behind and then within 10 minutes they're far from home and you're around the corner like the pied piper. You're just leading them all over the neighborhood, You're like leading your cat away.

That's yeah, I never even thought about that.

Right, that's exactly it. So the only time you should shake, treats and call is in your own yard, ideally at your door. You're trying to come, to come home to your door, not leave. Water is okay, you know. Water isn't going to cause a food fight. Water isn't going to cause your cat to get beat up, but cats. People need to understand that. Cats can go without food and water for days and even weeks. And putting food out because you're afraid they're going to starve is really biting your nose off despite your face. It's counterproductive because of the trouble it brings in. Mm-hmm. So yeah.

One of the things that you had mentioned in our conversation is another thing that I was guilty of, because we actually adopted out a cat who was a very hard to place cat, a very, very shy cat, to. A longtime friend of mine Adopted her out, this cat. You know, she was really kind enough to take this cat in, go through all this trouble of trying to acclimate the cat, who took forever to come out from under the bed, all of that stuff as she was moving across country, of all things. The cat got out. I don't know how it got out, but it got out of the person's house that she was staying at like as a stopover point, and so, of course, she calls me in a panic. What should I do? And my first thing was to set a trap, and that might not have been the best advice from what we were talking about before.

Yeah, traps are like the new litter box now. I see people who've never found a cat in their life giving out advice. And now the new, like litter box magic wand is set up traps. Set up traps. Sometimes that works, but again you're inviting critters in that aren't scared, aren't in panic mode, aren't hiding, they're like, oh food. And they waltz into the trap and they get stuck and then they're thrashing for their life, panicked, and your cat's watching that, all right. All right, all right, all right. Oh my god, that's scary. I'm not going near that thing, I'm not going anywhere near that thing.

That's a good point, and of course, the advice for trying to trap anything is always put the stinkiest, put sardines or something that has a really strong smell. So now you're just amplifying the message to the neighborhood critters to come and check out your trap. So, definitely something I won't be telling people anymore. Now I feel bad. Luckily she did get the cat pack, but he kind of came back on his own, or maybe he wasn't very far in the first place, I forget what it was, but they did end up finding him. Is there a difference between an indoor cat getting out and an outdoor cat kind of disappearing? From the standpoint of mistakes that people might make in searching for one or the other, yes, absolutely Good question.

There's a big difference. Usually, when an indoor cat gets out, they are scared and they're hiding. When an outdoor access cat disappears, he got curious and something happened. Okay, right, so scared, curious. Very different. So usually the scared cat is looking for the first dark, safe place to hide. A lot of people think they're going to hightail it to the woods Like it's an animal. It wants to go to the woods. No, indoor cats want to be under things. They want to not be seen. They want to be under dark, quiet areas, like under cars, under porches, under decks, under things, which, as a side note, is why GPS is not great for cat collars, because it doesn't pick. You know, satellite is from above and it doesn't pick them up. Yeah, if we talk about tracking collars, we can get into that, but the outdoor cat disappears. Something happened. He may have wandered into a garage and gotten stuck into a shed while someone was doing yard work. This is what happened to Mr Perr. This was my story. Okay, I lived on a horse farm. Mr Perr would follow me around while I did my horse chores and I thought, oh, he just got in a stall or something. But Mr Perr was stuck next door in a ranchers shipping container and it was summertime. He got locked in. Now curious cats are like I see something open they haven't been to before.

Oh, I've been in here, let me check this out. They are busy. He's not supposed to get stuck.

Yeah, and then the rancher closed the door because he's done with his project. He didn't know Mr Perr was in there sleeping. So that is an example of why it's so important. I mean, I could have alerted every soul on Facebook and he would not have been found. Yeah. I had to search, physically search and ask neighbors to access things that they did not want me to see or go to. But you got to search.

Yeah, that's an excellent point because they, you know, I would assume I guess I shouldn't assume, but we have barn cats here at the rescue ranch and they're, you know, anywhere from borderline feral to pretty darn feral. You know they show up for food but won't come in, you know, within X number of feet from you. But they usually do show up for food and I know they do travel throughout the day but generally they're going to come back at night. So that's a good point. You know, if after a certain period of time they haven't come back like they pretty much normally did, that's probably something has happened. On the flip side of that, with the indoor cats, what I have, because I've also had people not that I am a cat finding expert by any stretch of the imagination, certainly not but I have found a few cats inside people's houses when they would have sworn that the cat was nowhere. They say I looked everywhere and the cat is nowhere. I know that's something you said to me the other day. Especially with the indoor cats, search the house first.

Absolutely. Yeah Well, it doesn't hurt to put an alert on next door, just in case, but you've got to comb every cubic inch of the house, not just on the floor not just on the shelf but inside a blanket and up in the box springs of your bed, the false front subvernature. It looks like the bookcase goes to the floor, but from the back there's a hole underneath it. I heard about I was not involved in this, but I heard about a horror case of someone who found their cat six years after they saw it had gotten out. The skeleton was under one of those false front.

That's not good. Hopefully we'll find them before that happens. But you also told me an interesting story the other day about a cat in a chest. Tell that story if you do.

It's a sad story but in a way it's inspirational because it shows cats can survive. For I think it was like seven weeks, almost two months, in a blanket chest. Someone had opened up the chest to get a blanket out on a cold night. Kitty had jumped in I guess. In the morning they closed it without looking. Of course the people searched the woods. This was a cabin. They searched the woods, assumed the cat was killed by a coyote or a predator and gave up. Weeks and weeks later, I think, someone went to get a blanket out of that same chest and there was the kitty still alive. Oh wow, in a blanket chest there is zero water. There's no bugs. At least in a garage a cat can kill bugs and eat. She had gone blind. She was an organ failure. I don't think she made it Again. This was not one of my cases, it's just an example of how long cats can survive without food and water?

Yeah, that's obviously super sad but, like you said, it does give you hope, to me on a couple of different levels. Number one, the fact that it lasted that long. If they had been lucky enough to have found the cat sooner, then cat might have made it. I think the key message with the whole thing is that you literally have to look everywhere, because I've seen too many people just in my little experience with adopting out a cat and a week later the person's calling you in a panic because the cat's gone and it got out when the contractors were here. Not to say that that doesn't happen, because it does happen, but a terrified cat that you just adopted a week ago that has not left the bedroom that you have them in and you haven't seen it. The odds of that making it all the way through your three-story house and out the back door when the contractors were coming in are slimmer than the odds and correct me if I'm wrong that the cat is still somewhere in the house. I think people they don't do what you're saying. They don't look in every like, open every chest because you don't know who's been in that. Maybe I'm not the one that took the blanket out, but my significant other did, or a kid did. We actually had a cat and I know you said it told me a similar story. We call it the cat closet cat towels that live in the cat closet, even though we have more than just cats at the rescue. We had a cat that we couldn't find and he had gotten in there and he was in there for hours and didn't make a sound. I guess he was sleeping in there, but nobody could recall really even going in there or how he could have. Possibly because it boggles your mind sometimes how could I possibly not have seen him get in there, as I literally opened the door, grab a towel, close it again. How did he get in there? They're fast.

Yeah, and your eyes are at eye level and they're down on the floor.

That's true, yeah, he probably just darted in on the bottom and then made his way up to one of the top shelves because there he was sitting, happy training, pooping on my towels because he'd been there for a while. But yeah, it's amazing.

Never made a sound. No, never cried no.

Well, not until I opened the door, and then he was like here he comes. We actually even had a deaf kitten that we lost and we figured he was. Kind of a similar situation to the false front is that he and we didn't even really know he was deaf until then because he was pretty little, but he had gone behind a china cabinet up into the drawer it's like the doors are shut, so you say to yourself, okay, there's no way he could be in those drawers, I won't open those doors. But I mean, I found cats in drawers and I found them under drawers because they've come in from the back, like you said. So please people, like Kim said, put the alert out to the neighborhood, but do thoroughly search your house before you assume that the cat has gotten out for sure.

Yeah, Even if there's a contractor, the odds of the cat getting out versus went deeper into hiding are much stronger on the ladder. I just went deeper into hiding. A lot of people are like, well, he's not in his usual hiding place, that's because he was extra stressed with the saw going. Yeah, I went deeper. I learned about the drawers. My mother's cat goes behind her dresser and accesses the drawer from the back. And there was. I've had another case where somebody was in a hotel and when it was time to leave they couldn't find her cat. I assume the cat got out, but it was in the bathroom vanity in a drawer. So, actually once it was a hotel and once it was someone's apartment. Yeah, cats are just ninja hiders. They really are.

Oh yeah, and it's funny you say hotel, because that just totally reminded me of a story I'd completely forgotten about when I was in college. Our dorm was actually an old hotel, so it had the old school radiator things with the AC and the heat, and it's a tiny little room. So I had this illegal cat in my dorm room and it disappeared. And so I searched the apartment you know the just tiny little room, seemingly everywhere there. I had to now go and confess to my, the RAs, the dorm boss, that I had this illegal cat because it's like, okay, they need to be on the lookout, that this cat is somewhere. And no sooner had I gone down to her room, knocked on her door, confessed to having the cat to keep a lookout. I came back in here, comes the cat out from behind the radiator.

But I kind of glanced at it.

It didn't look like a cat could possibly fit in there, but boy, they can squeeze into some spaces.

Yep, yep, even under the dishwasher. Yeah. But the cat waited until you fast up yeah.

And then I had to give him to another kid because I couldn't have it anymore. So another girl kept him until we graduated and then he just kind of lived in her room for the next couple of months. You know, another thing that I wanted to talk to you about too is that we get a lot of calls from people who their cat's gone missing. You know, indoor cat gets out, it's been gone for. I mean, sometimes they don't even wait a couple of days, but you know, usually it's somewhere around the week mark. It's like oh, you know, it's been a week, we've seen no sign of it, we can't find it anywhere. We've searched all over the neighborhood and now we're looking to get another cat. Is there a timeline for finding cats that you would have to that you would say, okay, I should give up.

Or I mean, I would like to say never give up fully, but yeah, there's a saying on one of my loft cat groups of don't give up until you unless you find a body. But yeah, I've had cases two years. Oh wow, I don't think you should go get another cat, for at least I don't know six months. The thing is people think they've done everything when they haven't.

Right.

Almost every single person that gets my loft cat kit and even just skims it or watches the video says oh my God, I thought I had done everything. I had no idea. I wish I'd found you sooner, because you know, just like you said, people don't usually find me for a week or so after they've exhausted all the bad stuff, the free stuff. It doesn't work. And then someone tells them about me but yeah, I just can't see going and getting a replacement cat. It generally, I would say, conservative estimate two months is usually like if you've done everything and kept at it for two months and you don't have a single lead. Well, that means your cat probably was either dumped across town or accidentally got transported, so you still shouldn't give up. Right. But two months, I think, is a fair. If you're really doing all the things, Because you know there's eight angles, You've got to cover all eight. There's eight possibilities of what could have happened and how to go about your search. You need to cover every base, not just the three that make sense.

Definitely, and I think that's a good argument too not even just from a timeline perspective, but to think about where a cat could be, who it might come across in that timeframe and why it is so important to, or at least microchipping your cat at minimum, so that if they are picked up because that's what we tell people all the time when they find a cat, to report it to their local animal shelter. And I mean you can pretty much walk into any shelter, any veterinarian's office and ask them to scan the cat for a microchip, especially if the cat obviously doesn't have a collar and a tag or something like that, which many times they don't.

So also people should know Petco. Sometimes the vet's enclosed or people are afraid they're going to get charged. Petcos have the little band field and they will scan a chip for free.

Oh, great Okay.

Sometimes fire stations have scanners. Sometimes you can just contact your local TNR person and they'll have a scanner. I've got one, Actually we've got two.

So yeah, calling rescues usually happens. So for sure, yeah, because you can usually get a hold of somebody. As a matter of fact, I usually have one in my purse. I have the strangest things in my purse, but, yeah, I usually have a scan because you never know who you're going to come across that might need that, or you're out and about and you see that post and it's like, hey, you know, I'm in your neighborhood, let me come by and scan that cat for you, or dog or whoever it is, yep.

I have one too, in case I catch the wrong cat. I can see who it belongs to. Ah, there you go.

So you know, as far as you had mentioned, you're lost the lost cat kit and I know you said there's five. Can you tell us a little bit about what's in that kit? Because I think and I know we're going to share a link for sure on the show notes and on our social media for people to have this, Because just to be able to have your knowledge and experience at my fingertips as a pet owner is invaluable. And then I want to talk about some of the other things that you do, because I know obviously you physically go out and help people search and you have some other services. But tell us a little more about the lost cat kit.

The kit is essentially a booklet and a video, and it's online so people can download it to in the morning when they really feel like they've already tried everything there is. It comes in English and Spanish. The booklet tells you what to do based on the different cat types and your situation. So you want to combine okay, I've got a really friendly cat or I've got a super skittish cat and it's indoor only and I live in this kind of area and this is what time of day it went missing. And then you've got to look at the density are you in the country or the city? The weather all those things add up so you need to use the right techniques for your situation and cat type.

Well, I'm sorry I just have to say, because now it's totally clicking and making sense, because we had talked about can't we just tell people what to do to find their cat? And, based on what you were saying, it's like no, you can't. You can't just blanket say this is what you should do and now you've done everything right because it's so different. I'm out here on seven acres If my indoor cat gets out, that's very different than somebody that's in Manhattan and their cat gets out of their 10th floor apartment building kind of thing. So that's amazing that you've really been able to pin it down to very specific scenarios that people can. Then they just build their search from there.

Right, create your strategy based on your details. That's great.

That's great.

So the booklet kind of outlines the strategies for each situation and variable and then the video is more about. Okay, now, here's how you do the stuff. Here's how you set up a trail camera. Here's how you set up a trap. Here's how you find prints, here's how to look for fur fibers, here's the kind of tools you need and how to use them. It's more of a demo. It also shows a little bit of how I do tracking, how to listen for what the birds are saying, all the clues that help find the cat. Sometimes people they're just so stressed that they're not hearing the birds saying the cat's right there, right there, right there. The birds are going nuts Interesting, so they know where it is. So if you're aware of those little clues, let nature be your guide, kind of thing.

That's pretty amazing.

That's because people in a panic mode aren't thinking clearly, right? Yeah, I mean, the stress is immense. It just takes over your soul. No one quite understands what it feels like till it's happened to them, and it is a mix of panic, trauma, guilt, stress. People can't sleep and then they start doing even more dangerous things. I think I've talked to you about this, but a lot of Such good-hearted people it just kills me. They are killing themselves, searching day and night, and I'm seeing a new trend to go around search for your cat at night with a flashlight because you can see their eyes glow. But two issues with this A at night is when you want your cat to come out because they feel safer, and if you're out walking around. All they know is something big is moving around out there. I'm not coming out hiding, so you're basically keeping your cat in hiding. I truly have seen over the 11 years I've been doing this. Over-aggressive searching can be counterproductive. You've got to give your cat time to brave up and come out. Now I'm talking about indoor cats here. It's different if it's an outdoor cat than you want to do aggressive searching, but not for an indoor cat. Over-aggressive searching. I don't believe in searching at night. Nighttime is for luring them home. Daytime is for searching and looking for clues.

Yeah, yeah, I mean that's such great advice. I mean it's just not something people would like. You said you hear these myths and it seems to make sense, right, Because the eyes do glow, but so does every raccoon and everything else that's out there, I know, at least out here. There's all kinds of things out there at night and you could even be putting your cat in danger by drawing attention to them out in the dark, I would think.

Yeah. Now, if they're up a tree you definitely want to see. A lot of times you can see a cat in a tree because their eyes are looking down at you, Right, Because you might not see them in the daytime because the branch is blocking their body. So if you have a good reason to think they're up a tree, then yes, nighttime flashlight is good. I wish everyone that has a cat, in addition to a good picture, is a really great spotlight. I don't mean just a flashlight, but like one of these 1500 lumen flashlights that lights up your whole yard. You'd be surprised at how useful these are. I mean, I heard an owl the other night and went out with my spotlight and I spotted him right away. They're just. They're fun to have and useful for a lot of things, but absolutely top importance if you have a lost cat.

If somebody was either. Let's say they believe they've tried their best with using the resources, so you literally will get on a plane and fly to somebody's location to help them find their cat.

Well, I highly suggest the cheap method first. Okay, use the resources first, right, but before I'm going to get yes, I will get on a plane, I will fly to people's places. I have done that. But we have to go through a very detailed profile of the cat first. I need to know everything about the cat profiling. I need to learn the cat's habits. I need to assess the probabilities so that I've got a strategy when I hit the ground.

And you also mentioned that you do coaching. We do quite a bit of coaching with people. Is that just kind of like somewhere in between the DIY and getting Kim on a plane, that I can work with you, I guess what, via Zoom or a phone call to strategize so I can do some of the stuff myself?

Yeah, once I've got the DIY kit and I know the ground rules like you know, don't put out the litter box, for example and we're on the same page then I can start coaching them and fine tune their strategy Because you know, just like we talked about, they're stressed and they're not seeing the clues. I have a great example of a case of this. The people were just so panicked they didn't realize what I saw as the obvious solution. So I was able to get the cat found within 24 hours of talking to them because, going through their profile, I was able to really fine tune and say do this, this and this. That they just were too panicked, I guess, to think of. The coaching has worked great. That's great. A lot of the cases that are international, for example, were found through coaching. And yeah, it's on Zoom, so we can screen share and I can zoom in on satellite maps and see the details of the area. Basically, we're both looking at the same thing on Zoom.

Cool. So do you have a particular case other than your own which got you started?

Because obviously that's a great story, but any other success stories or happy endings yeah, I have them on my Facebook and I have them on my website on lostcatfindercom. I would say the one of Milo. That one's a short one, I can tell you, just because I kind of already started it. They were sure that their orange and white kitty, milo, had gotten it out. They lived in this very old house in Boston and it had lots of nooks and crannies. So they were like either he got over the wall in the basement into the guts of the house or he got out. They weren't sure which one it was. It was neither, and the way I figured it out was in the profile. I asked what was going on that night and one of them had gotten up in the middle of the night to get a snack and apparently, when I quizzed him a little more on that what time you got the snack and where was the snack it was in a fridge in the garage. So Milo had slipped into the garage. We didn't know that yet, but I figured it was possible. This was they had contacted me after they had already gone to the shelter and put up posters and gone to Home Depot to buy a trap. So Milo had gotten into the garage and he was hiding up in the guts of their SUV. Milo had driven with them when they put up their posters. They'd been up in the car when they went to the shelter to look for him. They'd been up in the car when they went to get a draft at Home Depot. Luckily he stayed put. So by the time they talked to me I said all right, keep the garage shut. But I want you to put a jar of tuna on the floor of the garage tonight and see what happens. And in the morning half the tuna was gone. Don't know, milo, because he had gone back up into the guts of the car. They had to call a mechanic over to take the car apart to get to him because he had gotten way into one of those cubby holes.

Oh man, wow. Yeah, that's scary because we've had animals come to our rescue that have. They don't know where they came from, but it's not their cat and it's not one from the neighborhood, but it came out from the car. They're so lucky that he did not get out somewhere along the way for sure, because it can out or fall out, god forbid.

Mm-hmm. I've seen that happen, and a lot of times. When the cat does fall out. I actually have a video from one of my clients. Her rear view camera captured her own cat falling out of her own SUV on the highway. Oh. And he was injured, but not terribly. He was found three months later. Oh, wow. And he was still alive. He was injured, but still alive. Yeah, yeah, they really are amazing survivors.

We all like to think that this will never happen and hopefully it won't. Luckily, we've got your resources to help us if it does. But are there any things that we can do preemptively maybe not preventatively, but preemptively to make the whole cat finding easier? Because you had mentioned putting up signs in the neighborhood, but that requires photos of your pet, if you.

Exactly. Yeah, I would love it if every cat owner indoor, outdoor doesn't matter get your cat chipped, because almost everyone has an indoor cat that gets out. So, oh, I didn't microchip them because they were indoor only, right, right, and now they're out. So microchipping number one. Number two get a photo of your cat today, Now, side view, standing or walking, full body, including the tail, facing the camera. Nobody ever seems to have this picture and it's the perfect view that you will need for a lost cat flyer, because you want the cat in a position that strangers are going to see it out in the world. If it's dashing across the street crouched under a car, right, nobody's going to recognize that cute little upside down kitty sleeping picture.

That's what I was just thinking of. It's like the white belly with maybe a little bit of tabby showing here, but yet you flip the cat over and it looks like a completely different cat. How am I supposed to recognize it? That's such a good point.

Yeah, every cat's tail is shaped a little different and they'll hold it a certain way. Some are fluffy, some aren't. The whole body and looking at the camera, I see so many people. Here's the flyer, here's my cat's face, here's his back view, here's his paws, and they've got like this collage that just turns into a mess. Cat parts. It's just a blur Cat parts. Yeah, just one single picture, silhouette it. Ideally you would get a picture of your cat walking against, like a white wall, simple, clear background, so it just jumps off the page. So get that picture ready, just in case you ever, ever need it.

Yeah, that's important, I will say as somebody that has volunteered at a shelter where people are calling for their missing cat. People do a terrible job of describing their cats in many instances, like I've had people say it's a brown tabby and it has four white socks and I've got one in the back that is a gray tabby that has two white socks and that's really their cat. Like how can you not know these things? Oh, you don't know how to describe your own cat. If you had that picture, at least you could show the person the picture. I mean, there's a reason. A picture is worth a thousand words, right?

Yeah, 5,000. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, and the microchip for sure, yes the microchip and you had mentioned this and I want to make sure we don't forget to mention it. Your microchip needs to be updated if you move, if your phone number changes. We run into that a lot in rescue where the microchip is either not registered, so you need to make sure it's initially registered to you at your address and your current phone number. Ideally you would have a backup person. It's kind of like in the Air Force. They always wanted you to have like a what is your permanent home address? Whoever is in your life that you know is probably not going to move or die anytime soon. Get their information as the backup on there or change their phone number, but then just keep it updated, keep that microchip updated and realize a lot of the microchip companies when you go to update that information, there's going to be information on there about paying a fee and that's for a different level of service. It's not always very clear. You should not have to pay the microchip company to change your telephone number or your address, because that's something that's so frustrating is you. We get an animal in rescue and, yes, it's got a chip but it's unregistered and you can tell it's well cared for but we can't get it back to you if we don't know who the heck you are and your cat can't tell us so definitely.

Yeah, so frustrated. Yeah. And also, let's make sure people understand it's cheap. It's what? $25 to get your cat microchipped and a lot of vets will do it in home. That's to do health calls. You don't have to stop your cat in a carrier just for a microchip. A lot of people say, oh, I was gonna do it next time we went to the vet and I just forgot. Yeah, I mean we do it, man, it is so important.

It is critical. We at least in our rescue and that's something to ask when you get an animal from a shelter or a rescue, is microchipping part of that process and what do they do with that? In our rescue all of our microchips get registered to us before we even put in an animal. They're all. They got our contact information as a backup and then when you adopt from us, we register it for you because we don't trust you to do it yourself. But not every organization does that. Sometimes you'll, you know, you'll get handed all this paperwork with the pet and in that paperwork somewhere is a paper telling you how to register your microchip. You gotta look at that paperwork. So definitely something to check up on. And you're right, whether it's 25 bucks, sometimes it's 40 bucks, it's worth it because the cost of not knowing what happened to your pet is just to me too high a price. I mean you can't put a price on your pet. So 40 or 50 bucks and check, you know, check with your local rescues, your shelters, you know, a lot of times we do microchipping clinics. We do free microchipping, you know, for just for the community, not even necessarily people that adopt from us. So keep your eye out for that, if nothing else. But it's probably one of the best investments you can make, especially with a cat, for sure.

Yeah, it really is. That could be the difference in finding your cat one day or not. Yeah, yeah.

Yep definitely. For sure.

So anything else that you wanna cover or say, well, I would like for anybody that's tuned in listening from a rescue or a shelter, encourage them to let owners know that my resources that the lost cat exists. You know a lot of these shelters have lost found pages like here's how to report your cat's lost, but why not tell them? Oh, and here are some expert scientific resources on how to find a lost cat. If you're interested, here's the link. I'm hoping more shelters will help get the word out that there are scientific methods. You don't have to depend on people who've never found a cat in their life.

Yeah, it's shocking to me, the people that well, it's just shocking in general, I think, the questions people will put out on Facebook, for example, for just any rando to answer and you're gonna take that advice. You don't even know that person, you have no idea what their background, their expertise, have they ever, like you said, they have any experience in that? But you're gonna listen to their advice. It's like, why not listen to an expert? So we'll definitely help get the word out because it's so important yeah they're okay and thank you so much for being here with me today and for sharing all of this great information and a little insight into what you do. That's fascinating that you took something that was a one-time incident for you and your cat and turned it into something that's helping people around the world. This is amazing to me. Thank you.

It's an honor to do it and to be on your show, Amy. Thank you All right.

Well, everybody, we always like to say if you don't do anything else this week, give your pets a hug from us. And that's kind of my closing line. But what I'd like to say even if you have to skip the hug because you don't have enough time for your pet, to give your pet a hug from us, share this podcast episode with your cat-loving friends and family members. So, thank you all, so much for listening and we will see you next week.