Miso's Incredible Journey

by Skylaire Alfvegren

Recently, video of a hungry black bear nosing around in the suburban La Crescenta foothills made international news, as the bear turned a corner and startled a man texting his boss about the helicopters, police cars and general commotion outside his home. With three tranquilizer darts, the bear was subdued and released deep in the Angeles National Forest, but his excursion to La Crescenta underscores the fact that the neighborhood plays hosts to coyotes and other wildlife.

La Crescenta resident Rob Feldman knows this better than anyone. When his strictly indoor feline Miso accidentally got outside last April, the traumatized cat wouldn’t come back to its home. “She didn’t know to stay by the house, and took off. We spent a lot of time looking for her, and we thought that she’d been eaten, that she had died. We alerted the neighbors, we tried everything we could. And then a month or so later, there were sightings of her in the neighborhood.” Feldman’s three sons “were devastated.”

The family’s cat fancy had begun with a friend’s Tokinese (a stately crossbreed between a Siamese and a Burmese). “We just fell in love with it, and we bought a purebred just like it, and named him Shabu. He was our first cat,” he says. Feldman operates a video service for the law profession. “We realized that we were on the road quite a bit and Shabu needed a friend at home, so we got Miso.”

We all know that cats are wily beasts. One in three household pets in the US will get lost at least once in their lifetime; without the proper identification—microchips and ID tags—90% of lost pets never return home. Miso was microchipped, but, Feldman says, “Eventually we just decided that she wasn’t going to come back to us, and we actually got another cat we named Saki, who got along great with Shabu.”

Miso reunited

Out of the blue, “I get this email from FixNation, that our cat had been located!” They had identified her owners via her microchip, after being caught in one of FixNation’s humane traps. “And that was nine or ten months after she’d gone missing!” Although initially concerned about reintroducing Miso to Shabu and the new cat, Feldman’s worries were quickly put to rest. For one thing, she hadn’t gone feral. “We don’t know how she survived through the winter out there,” he says. “And there’s tons of wildlife in the area. It’s pretty amazing!”

“We are so grateful to FixNation,” Feldman enthuses. “We’re certain we would have never seen this cat again, if not for their efforts. Our kids were just devastated without Miso. We really, really appreciate the work that FixNation does.”

Miso welcomed home by Shabu

It’s National Pet ID Week, and Miso’s amazing journey home is purr-oof of the importance of microchipping our furry friends. No more painful to administer than a vaccination, a microchip is an affordable way to help ensure that if your cat or dog goes missing, it (and you) can be identified. Microchips are even better insurance than ID tags because they can’t fall off–in tandem, they provide pet owners with the most piece of mind.

Get your cat (or dog) microchipped at one of FixNation’s upcoming “low-cost vaccination” clinics. Check the events calendar for dates and details.