Two cats who went missing after moving with their family each turned up at their old home.
Christy Durst-McMaster’s cat Chase took off out the front door during all the activity going on the day she and her husband moved into a new place. Christy tried to catch him and bring him back inside, but he panicked and took off. A few days later, her other cat, Rocky, escaped from the garage when she was out there getting something.
Christy looked for the cats, and even went back to her old home, located just a few miles away, on the off chance that they might have gone back there. She checked on the internet, including at the site for the Burlington County Shelter, which serves the Moorestonm New Jersey area where she is located.
Meanwhile, Nichole Switzer moved into Christy’s old residence early last month and began to hear something scratching at her door. That something was a black cat. A few days later he was joined by a gray cat.
Nichole became concerned, thinking the cats may have been abandoned by the previous tenant, and called her friend, Laura Bourque, who helped her trap the cats and take them to the no-kill Vorhees Animal Orphanage.
The Burlington County SPCA Humane Police were notified of a possible animal abandonment case and officer Armand King spoke with Nicole and Laura about the cats. He then traced Christy and Mike McMaster and was able to determine that no only did they not abandon the two cats, they were desperately worried and searching for them.
“The woman from the house thought I abandoned my cats, which I did not,” Christy told the Courier-Post for a story on the incident. “I guess they had to investigate because they didn’t know. Officer King came to my door last Saturday morning and the look on his face, I thought, ‘ok, what happened to my cats?’ I said ‘I brought them here, they were here’. He told us where they were and in a matter of an hour we went and ran down there and picked them up.
“The day we moved in, we brought them over in carriers and brought them into the house.
“The first day, we were moving something in and Chase took off out the door, straight across the street into the neighbor’s bush. I went to get him and kind of chased him around and went to bring him back and he started scratching and then he took off again across the street.”
“It wasn’t that far from our old house, we would drive back over and call his name and walk on the lawn and see if he was there,” she said. “Nothing.”
Then Rocky escaped from the new house and disappeared.
“Again, we kept looking for them, nothing,” Christy said.
“I began looking on the Burlington County Shelter page and I was looking at different things on the Internet. We later found out that they were taken to the shelter on the 4th. Here we were looking for them and it was the day after Rocky disappeared that she took him. I wouldn’t even have had a chance to look for them.”
Christy was reunited with Chase and Rocky last Saturday morning.
“Oh my goodness, Rocky was in a cage and was on the top level,” she told the Courier-Post. “They opened it up, he popped his head out. They don’t show emotions, but I could tell he was excited to see us.”
“We are so happy that the cats have been reunited with their owners,” Laura said. “I had grabbed the cats and got them into a no-kill shelter. We thought this was going to turn out to be bad but it turned out wonderful.”
