Early in the afternoon, I take a call from a woman wanting to bring a found cat in to be scanned for a microchip. My city has a large feral cat population, so most found cats don’t belong to anybody and are not chipped, but I told her to bring the cat any time we were open.

Two hours later, a couple walks in with a beautiful white kitty sitting in an open cardboard box. I bring them into the exam room so he doesn’t escape from the box and get into trouble, and get the microchip scanner.

The scanner beeps almost immediately. Huzzah! He has a chip! I check in our computer in case he’s a patient of ours (no dice), then look up the chip number on the AAHA website. Second huzzah! The chip is actually registered! Many people have chips put in but never register with the chip company, rendering the chip useless.

The chip company gives me the number they have on file with the owner and I call it. It goes to voicemail, but third huzzah! The voicemail message indicates that is in fact the phone of the owner on record.

The owner calls back almost immediately and we get as far as “Do you have my cat?” and “Yes!” before the call drops. I spend ten minutes trying to call back, but can’t get through. I thank the people who brought the cat in and set him up in a kennel to wait for the owner to call back.

About half an hour later, the owner calls back. The poor man had spent all day putting up lost cat posters in his neighborhood, finally got the call that his kitty was found, and his phone ran out of battery. We gave him directions to our clinic, and waited for him to arrive.

About 40 minutes later, the found kitty’s owner arrived. The cat had been kennel shy with us (i.e. nervous and hissing at anyone who approached), but as soon as his owner appeared, I opened the kennel door and he climbed right into his daddy’s arms.

This kitty’s owner did everything right to enable us to contact him, and I’m so glad I was able to reunite them.

This story is part of our end-of-year Feel Good roundup for 2022!

Read the next Feel Good 2022 story!

Read the Feel Good 2022 roundup!

My family has always been blessed/cursed with extremely bright cats. Several of us have stories about how we’ve been outsmarted by our own pets, but my favorite is my mom’s.

When I was a kid, Mom had several indoor/outdoor cats, the kittens of a feral cat she befriended. Since microchip cat doors weren’t affordable – they may not have even been available – at the time, and Mom was absolutely not willing to have a flap that anything could come through in her front door, we let the cats in and out manually.

When a cat wanted to come inside, it would sit at the front door and meow. Mom quickly learned to check to make sure the cat’s mouth was empty before opening the screen door, because they kept trying to smuggle rodents into the house to hunt later. We were fine with them hunting – there were a lot of mice around and no endangered species that we knew of – but not bringing prey inside!

One evening, Mom heard a very clear “Mew?” from outside. It sure didn’t sound like the cat had anything in her mouth, but she opened the door and looked anyway. The cat looked up at her, and even seemed to be turning her head from side to side as if to demonstrate, “See? I don’t have anything!”

Mom opened the screen door, and the cat took two steps into the house, bent over, and deposited a live, extremely unhappy mouse onto the floor. As near as we could work out afterward, she must have pinned it while she meowed, then gotten the whole thing – including the tail! – into her mouth in the time it took Mom to come to the door.

Mom eventually caught the mouse and released it outside, and from then on, the cats had to open their mouths before they could come inside.

This happened back in the mid-nineties. My sister and I had kept and bred exotic animals like frogs, snakes, and praying mantises for a number of years. At one point, we heard about some guy turning up in a local supermarket with a snake around his neck, claiming it was a very venomous species of snake from Australia.

Less than a week after first hearing this story, I actually saw him in said supermarket. What he had around his neck, I immediately recognised as a North American ribbon snake (Thamnophis sauritus), which was sixty centimetres (about two feet) in total length. I ask him:

Me: “Do you know what species of snake it is?”

Snake Man: “It is a very dangerous Australian snake.”

Me: “It’s a North American species about as dangerous as our own common grass snake – that is, not at all.”

I gave him my phone number and told him that if he had any questions, he could just call me. 

A few days later, he did indeed call. He asked me if I could come and take a look at the snake. As he lived fairly close to me, I went there.

Snake Man: “The snake won’t eat.”

Me: “What are you feeding it?”

Snake Man: “I’ve given it liver pâté, but it won’t eat.”

His reply stunned me. He then invited me in and showed me the snake. He kept it in an ordinary wooden cupboard. There was no heat in the cupboard and no windows, so it was completely dark in there. The snake did have a bowl of water and a bit of liver pâté, and that was that.

I told him that it mostly ate amphibians and small fish, that it needed to be kept in a proper terrarium with heat, a hiding place and preferably some decent lighting producing the right kinds of UV light. I also told him that it would be a good idea to add vitamin powder to its food because it wasn’t exposed to natural sunlight and thus possibly would end up showing signs of vitamin D3 deficiency.

He thought about it for a moment and then asked me if he could just give it to me. I accepted it, and it lived with us for more than six years after that.

Dogs aren’t supremely common where I was living at the time of this story. Most properties were more or less built into vertical cliffs, so having a fenced-in space for a dog was difficult at best.

It’s not a law outside of required areas, but it’s generally accepted that when you walk your dog, you keep it on a leash. The only times I saw someone with a dog not doing this is because the dog was so old that “racing into the road” was less likely than “being able to make it through the walk”

Enter a neighbor and their Keeshond (basically, a labrador-sized ball of fluff and speed) and his love of chasing cats. My cat hated the road but would always follow me up the steps to it when I left for work, and often sat on the stairs waiting for me.

Turned out this dog did not have a leash and loved to chase cats. We found this out when my flatmate heard awful barking and the cat screeching before lunging into the safety of my room. His owner casually stood at the top of the stairs (almost three stories up from our house, five from the garden the dog was now in) calling for him to come back. It took about half an hour to round up the wayward dog.

That’s it, lesson learned, right?

NO!

This started to happen every week until my cat learned the beast’s routine and hid. While as far as I can tell the fluff-beast will not run out into the road, but if you go walking at the same time as him, you WILL be part of his territory now.

This is my grandmother’s story that happened about fifteen or so years ago now. For some context, my grandmother ended up adopting a Chihuahua puppy from my uncle, her son, after his stupidity about refusing to get his dogs fixed led to an “oopsie” litter (for the record, though, he did get them all fixed after this incident because this litter was inbred, and it definitely showed).

This puppy immediately took to my grandmother like a baby duckling and tottled along after her everywhere.

Now, my grandmother is and always has been an active and rather mischievous person, so she decided to mess with the pup a bit only a month or so after bringing her home. She darted ahead and hid around a corner waiting for the pup to follow her. The moment she came up to the corner, my grandmother jumped out and made a mock roaring sound. The pup just sat her butt down and promptly peed all over herself and the floor.

Whenever my grandmother retold this story, she always said that she absolutely deserved the punishment of having to clean that mess up and never tried to mess with the pup like that again!