Losing a Pet Just Breaks Your Heart

Over the weekend our family had a not so fun pet adventure involving our newest kitten.

At the end of August we added a new fur baby to the family.  Lemmy, is our cuddly disgustingly cute kitten.  We got him chipped and his shots and we were just finally letting him go out into the backyard with our other cats.  He's been doing well.  He won't leave the patio, but he's enjoyed being outside some.

Let me preface this by saying, we have a neighborhood stray that the neighbor feeds and she hangs out on our roof, occasionally in our backyard.  However, on Sunday morning, apparently she went after the kitten and big brother stepped in and got into a huge fight with the stray.  Unfortunately, sometime during this whole kerfluffle.   My kitten bolted out of fear, or out of being hurt.  He was gone.

We searched everything in our backyard.  We looked like creepy people walking up and down the alley looking in the neighbors backyards for the little guy.  We walked the block at least 4 times trying to find him.  We tore through the house and garage thinking he might be hiding somewhere.  He was gone.  No where to be found.

After a few hours, I posted to all the lost pet Facebook pages and to Nextdoor just in case.

He spends 20 minutes outside at most when he goes outside, and he's never gotten out of the backyard.  By this time he had been gone for 12 hours.   I went to bed last night in tears because our baby was gone.   I had a hard time falling asleep and guess I finally did.

At 2am last night, something bolted onto our bed and it was Lemmy.  He was shaking, he was covered in dirt and gunk.  Apparently he had been through kitty hell and after 16 hours missing he found his way home.

He curled up at our feet next to his big brother Indy and went to sleep.   This morning with less that 2 hours of sleep he was up with me.  All he wanted to do was cuddle and play.  He was so happy to be home.

Thank you to everyone who shared his post and your kind thoughts.  Luckily our story has a happy ending, but some families don't.

If you do find that your pet is missing, here are some places you can post to:

or you can join Nextdoor for your neighborhood.  It helps keep you up to date with your neighborhood including lost pets, crime, etc.

You can also report found animals to these pages as well.