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After 5 months, cat came back

Devin Heilman Staff Writer | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 8 years, 3 months AGO
by Devin Heilman Staff Writer
| October 18, 2016 9:00 PM

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<p>Catniss relishes a long head massage at her home on Monday after she had been lost for five months.</p>

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<p>Gracie Kingsley holds her cat, Catniss, as she looks out the window.</p>

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<p>Caitylynn Rast found Catniss at her soon to be in-law's house up Highway 95. She was gone for five months and is now home in her owner's loving arms.</p>

COEUR d’ALENE — Today is Gracie Kingsley's 15th birthday, and she already received the most purr-fect gift she could have ever wanted.

Her beloved black Bombay cat, Catniss, returned to her loving embrace late last week thanks to the help of a kind stranger who checked for a microchip. The cat had been missing since Mother's Day.

"It's like, the best birthday present ever," Gracie said Monday afternoon as she held the feline, who lazily closed her eyes. "It’s like,

'Woo!' just to get my mind wrapped around it because she’s been gone for so long."

Gracie never thought she would see Catniss again. She and her mom Shawn were preparing to take down all the "missing" posters they had placed around town five months ago and finally accept that Catniss was gone for good.

Then they got the phone call that made both of their hearts leap.

"I was about go to go to bed. It was like 9:40, and the phone rang and I didn’t even pick it up. I just waited for the answering machine and you can hear the message and it was like, ‘So we have this cat here and it scanned ‘Miss Piggy,’' and I was like, 'We did not put 'Miss Piggy' on the posters, they have her!'" the beaming teen said.

She explained that Catniss' original name when she was at Panhandle Animal Shelter was "Miss Piggy," under which her microchip was registered. While they were looking for Catniss, they experienced many false leads from people who thought they knew where she was.

But once they heard that someone had "Miss Piggy," they knew it was their kitty.

"It's amazing," Gracie said.

Also amazing is where Catniss was found: crying in the back of kind stranger Caitlynn Rast's in-laws' house near Upriver Drive off Highway 95, more than five miles from the Kingsley's Canfield Mountain neighborhood.

"She'd been running around the property for a while, but I was never able to catch her," Rast said. "I went to their house for dinner and she was meowing at the back door, poor thing. I picked her up and wrapped her in a blanket to keep her warm."

The Kingsleys had posted in the lost and found pets forum on Facebook when Catniss first disappeared, and it was in this same thread Rast posted that she had been found. Rast also took her to an emergency pet clinic in Post Falls to check for a chip, even though she said Catniss is so sweet she wouldn't have minded keeping her if she didn't have an owner.

"I just know that if my dog were to get out and I weren't able to find her, how devastated I would be," said Rast, of Post Falls. "It makes me feel especially awesome inside to know that just spending a half hour to find a cat's owners is worth it in the end."

Gracie and Shawn are eternally grateful to Rast for bringing Catniss in for a microchip check. They said she is a hero and it's a miracle the feline was returned to them unscathed after so long.

"There are no words to describe it," Shawn said.

The day she went missing, Catniss had rubbed out of her collar. Shawn said she is so friendly that someone may have picked her up thinking she was a friendly stray. She may have gotten out of someone's house or been dropped off on the outskirts of town.

But in the end, it was a caring soul and a tiny piece of technology that reunited Catniss with her rightful owners.

"I hope this story motivates people to know the importance of microchips," Shawn said. "I think everybody should get every pet microchipped because they can rub out of their collars, especially cats."

"We're blessed and grateful and thankful," Gracie said.

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