We really do live in Facebook these days and it took a friend request to reunite a cat with her family.
Facebook, microchipping and innovative thinking have combined to reunite a lucky white cat with her grateful person.
Belle the cat came to Victoria Animal Control Services after she was found to be living under the deck of a concerned Victoria BC area resident. Her microchip revealed that she had been adopted from the Montreal SPCA, which provided the adopter’s name to the VACS staff, but the trail seemed to go cold when it was discovered that the adopting family’s telephone number was no longer in service.
According to VACS officer Ian Fraser, an innovative staff member decided to search Facebook for Belle’s missing person and felt hopeful of a match when someone with the right name came up as having attended Montreal’s McGill University.
Once Belle had her profile set up with an identifying photograph for her profile picture she sent a friend request to her presumed family member, who was in fact her very own missing person, who had moved to Victoria without updating Belle’s microchipping data.
The scheme worked and cat and person were happily reunited.
“It was great that one of my staff had the smarts to do the Facebook search,” Mr. Fraser said. “It just shows you what ends we’ll go to try to locate someone and reunite them with their animal.”
Happy endings ensued when the two Facebook friends were helped to find one another again, and we are left with a few tidbits to ponder. Facebook can be a powerfull tool for good; innovative thinking is sometimes required to get satisfactory results; and while it is very important and helpful to microchip our cats and dogs we need to remember to keep our information updated, because we cannot count on all animal control services or shelters to use such clever means to find us should our pets become lost.
That was a great idea.
F A B U L O U S ~ !!!!!!!!!!!!!
Good thinking!