Three years later and 25 miles from home, long-lost cat found in Cedar Rapids

ANAMOSA - When the cat adoption center where he lived caught fire, Tommy, a gray short-haired cat, ran away.

He the other felines scattered - hiding in bushes or behind nearby houses as fire trucks blared their horns.

In the weeks after the October fire three years ago, the cats, one by one, were found by volunteers from the Animal Welfare Friends Shelter in Anamosa.

Every cat but Tommy.

'Tommy was always the one,” said Tracy McCarty, who manages the animal shelter.

Search for Tommy

Once, someone reported seeing him - or a cat that very much resembled him - running across the Wapsipinicon River bridge, heading toward the state park. But McCarty, then a shelter volunteer, still couldn't track him down.

'We never heard anything more after that,” she said.

For months, McCarty kept looking. She studied humane live traps and placed them all around, so many traps that she had to map them to remember where they were. She posted fliers. She did a double-take every time she saw a gray cat darting through the bushes.

The other cats moved into a small space in Olin while the animal welfare not-for-profit set about raising funds to build a new $280,000 shelter.

Last month, three years after the fire, they opened a new shelter in Monticello.

After all this time, McCarty sometimes wondered where Tommy had gone.

an unlikely discovery

Some 25 miles away, a stray cat strolled into a Cedar Rapids house last Wednesday, ran into a bedroom and began to yowl.

The people inside the home called Cedar Rapids Animal Care & Control to come get him.

Back at the Cedar Rapids shelter, the cat's microchip was scanned and traced back to the old Anamosa shelter.

A month after the Monticello shelter's grand opening, McCarty got a call. She ran the microchip number through her system, thinking it was probably a cat whose owner had forgotten to register the chip after adopting.

'Tommy?” McCarty thought, as the cat's information popped up on her screen. 'What a weird coincidence that this cat's name is Tommy, too.”

Then, it hit her.

'There were lots of tears, happy tears,” she said, upon realizing the cat was the Tommy she'd been searching for. 'It's almost like he waited until we got our building. Now we have a place for him.”

When Tommy finally returned from his three-year trip, Chris Kenney, the shelter's foundation president, said the long-lost gray cat walked right up to McCarty.

'He jumped up on her lap ... and gave her a kiss right on her nose,” he said.

A veterinarian looked over Tommy on Friday, Kenney said, and found the cat likely broke one of his legs during his travels. But it's not causing him pain anymore.

'Who knows what he's been up to?” McCarty said.

'kitty mascot”

Now that the prodigal cat has returned, he's not going anywhere. Instead of being put up for adoption, McCarty said he'll be the shelter's 'kitty mascot.”

He's also the face of a new campaign for microchipping pets, for which Kenney said shelter officials plan to begin fundraising soon.

'We'll use that money to help pay for microchips,” he said. 'So, just like this story, we can help find those animals later.”

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