CAT’s mission is to work with our community to save the lives of homeless, sick and injured cats and kittens by offering shelter, adoption, foster, hospice, and veterinary services to end needless feline euthanasia in our community.
Imagine you are sitting on a bench at a lovely neighborhood park, enjoying the spring sun when you feel a tug on your pant leg. You look over and into the sad brown eyes of a little one who is all alone. He says to you, “Hi, I’m Sam and I can’t find my family. My momma always makes me carry this, but I can’t read it. I know my house has a green door. Can you help me?”
Sam adds with a little shyness, “I don’t normally go outside by myself, but it was such a pretty day.” You look at the information and know exactly where Sam lives. About five blocks away. You bend down, scoop him up, and take him home.
Wait a minute! Scoop him up?
Sam is a tabby cat, you see, a very lucky cat because he is wearing an ID tag on his collar. All of Sam’s information was there: name, phone number, and address. It was easy to get him back home to the family who had been searching all over for him. They never guessed he got that far from home.
Wouldn’t it be nice if lost pets could ask for our help?
Sadly, only 2 percent of lost cats are reunited with their families. Dogs are a little luckier (19 percent find their way back home). With over 50,000 stray cats and dogs arriving at Oregon shelters each year, that means only 500 of the 25,000 lost or stray cats make it back home.
A microchip is not enough for indoor-only cats.
Many cat owners will only microchip their cat. Consider the story of Sebastian, a beautiful black kitten adopted from a Wisconsin shelter. When he was only seven months old, Sebastian wandered off and went missing. Fast forward to November of last year when an adult stray cat was brought to the local animal shelter, where he was scanned for a microchip. After four years on the lam, he was reunited with his family. An ID tag would have gotten him home about 1,460 days sooner.
Every cat adopted from the Cat Adoption Team gets microchipped and we encourage cat owners to put a collar with an identification tag on their cat.
CAT recently surveyed our online friends about pet identification to see where what pet owners in the Portland area think. The results include dogs and cats:
When asked what form of identification their dog/cat had (multiple answers were allowed):
We then asked if their pet had ever been lost. And thankfully 73.9 percent answered “no”. However, for 26.1 percent who said their pet had been lost at some point, we queried how they got their pet back.
One of the comments received from respondents summed up why many now have their pet sporting some sort of identification:
“My cat who was lost was not wearing ID, as she was an indoor-only cat. She escaped. Lesson learned. Now all my pets are microchipped.”
Many indicated since their cats were indoor-only, they did not feel the need to put a collar with tags and/or microchip their pet cats. Some even stated that their cats would not tolerate a collar. One survey respondent explained the feeling, “my kitty won’t tolerate a collar. We’ve tried many different kinds and she manages to get out of all of them.” Luckily, she is microchipped.
A study sponsored by the Humane Society of the United States found that almost three out of four cats tolerated a collar and kept it on for six months. Most cats in the study exceeded their owners’ expectations about keeping it on – 62 percent of the cats in the study wore collars without incident.
Only 18 cats out of the 538 cats in the study (3.3 percent) had collars caught on the cat’s mouth or forelimb, or on some other object.
Here’s the clincher: the owner’s persistence was the key to the cat’s learning to wear a collar.
Linda Lord, assistant professor of veterinary preventive medicine at Ohio State University and lead author of the study, said, “A lot of people start out with the dogma that cats can’t wear collars, that they won’t tolerate them or that they’re dangerous. Now pet owners can look at this research and, if they own a cat, maybe they will now consider that they will be able to put identification on them.” Read more.
While we hope indoor cats do not get out, the fact is that they do. It just takes a door not closing or a hole in the screen. According to a lost pet study by the American Humane Association, 41 percent of the people searching for their lost cats considered them to be indoor-only pets.
“I feel so much safer when all my pets have collars with tags (and of course microchips). Even though my cats are indoor-only, animals are unpredictable and could get scared or curious and run away at any time.”
Many organizations, such as CAT, host low-cost microchip clinics during the first weekend of April as part of National Tag Day, a pet identification awareness campaign. You can also pick from a wide selection of safety and break-away cat collars at CAT’s in-shelter boutique.
Written by Kathy Covey
14175 SW Galbreath Drive.Sherwood, OR 97140.(503) 925-8903..(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
