There is a cat in my garden. Is it lost?

[lowhangingbranch]

There is a healthy, glossy coated, collared cat sitting contentedly in my garden. Is it lost?

I am a follower of several facebook sites for local villages/ communities. In the past couple of years I have noticed a large number of posts like this. Someone will take a photo of a healthy looking, glossy coated cat, often with a collar sitting in a relaxed pose in their garden and ask if it is lost. Sometimes they will say 'the cat looks thin' but the photo shows a normal, healthy cat that definitely does not look thin. Invariably someone will reply to say the cat is not lost but is mine/ belongs to Mrs Miggins at No. 5 and just likes to wander in the neighbourhood. As cats do.

The other day there was an upgrade on this theme when someone posted a photo of a dog saying it was lost so they took it home, only to receive several angry replies from the owner saying that is their dog and it likes sitting on the end of the drive and was not lost, and they wanted their dog back.

Is this just a thing local to me? Or is it a nationwide trend for people to be desperate to find lost animals and so seeing them everywhere, even though there is nothing to indicate the animal is lost?

Cats use my garden as a toilet, so if I see them “just chilling” I’m afraid I shoo them away.

i certainly don’t put anything on social media, but plenty of people do in my local Facebook group 🤣 bonkers!

@LondonPapa so it should be illegal, why would anyone want to harm a defenceless animal ?

Nothing boils my blood more than all those "ah, looks like that cat has chosen you. He is yours now" posts when someone posts a photo of a cat seen in their garden
If anyone steals my cat, I wouldn't be responsible for my actions !!

@SeaAndStars pardon ? Someone thinks a Gull is lost ? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

@thelovelyview did you get her back ?

I have one in my garden that I think lives in the little wilderness part underneath my oak tree because I found her little nest of leaves that she sleeps in - which almost broke my heart! I can’t be too sure though because, you know, it’s a cat and they wander and are greedy fat lazy bastards. So I just leave some cheap biscuits out every now and then. Keep a water bowl topped up and have built a shelter bit with a blanket just incase it’s needed.(she sits on top of it) She won’t let me near her to try and take her to a vet so I’m sure she’s fine. I call her Scrat.

Yeah same in my community. Fine if the cat has been there a long time, seems ill or distressed or doesn’t seem to want to leave and you want to let the owner know where it is, but a healthy looking cat just roaming as they do, leave it alone .unless of course someone posts specifically looking for a cat matching its description! Obviously a wandering dog away from home is a bit different as they aren’t supposed to wander and has probably escaped or got off the leash. We have a few regular posts about escaped huskies and malamutes around here as they are known for being talented escape artists!

Yes this is common. One of my favourite hobbies in the depths of 2020 lockdowns was to read the ‘lost’ cat posts on my local Nextdoor site (in my experience the level of crazy is dialled up a notch from FB). I seemed to have one neighbour who was hell bent on capturing and taking to the vet every free moggie around, she’d jump on posts within 15 min offering to trap them. Much more sensible is when you see someone suggest a adding paper collar asking if the cat is owned.

A famous local old boy who likes to sit on the pavement near me has a named collar, his owner regularly posts updates in local public FB groups and even has T-shirts printed saying ‘Smeaton has eaten’ but there’s still a concerned post every couple of months!

Just had this - we have a road WhatsApp group and someone posted a pic of my cat sitting on my roof and asked ‘anyone lost a cat’? He’s a big Maine Coon. I replied ‘no it’s just the new Neighbourhood Watch lookout’. Posted a pic him having dinner later ‘chowing down after his shift’.

My cat turned up on my doorstep and cried for 3 hours ,she was in lovely condition. (i posted on here at the time 5 years ago) I posted on street whatsap and she had been round most of the neighbours.
I took her to the vet, no microchip, no reports of lost cat. Posted on all local lost pet forum and put posters up in local streets, no one came forward and she is still with us!

Our local Next Door has pretty much shut (because it was entirely colonised by nutters so the normal people stayed off) but when it was still working, there was a woman who posted a picture of every cat she saw to ask if it was lost. It started off with people telling her how kind she was and ended with people asking if there was something wrong with her. They had had enough.

The thing is, the people who see a healthy cat on a wall and think it must be lost probably don’t see many actual stray cats. The ones in Greece and Albania were really manky looking.

Next door is a dodgy company , it was suggesyed i join when i found my cat but i was not happy given them access to my contacts.
They send out letters in the name of my neighbours without permisdion, its so dodgy.

It's reached epidemic proportions in our bit of suburbia.
The pick of the bunch was a lady who saw what she admitted was a perfectly healthy cat with collar, but was convinced something was up because she hadn't seen this cat before. She couldn't get close enough to read its collar so she then enticed it over with a bowl of food and found out that the collar read "please don't feed our cat". She then took a photo of the cat being fed and posted it all over social media, telling everyone what she had done, because she was still worried about the cat.

Dear Lord.

@CalzoneOnLegsNo we did not. I didn’t see who had her for about 3 months, despite looking everywhere and contacting vet, and by then she didn’t consider us home. Of course, she’d been kept in, I expect. We tried to get her back but it was too late, and the cat struggled to leave our house asap, despite previously being very happy here. It was around ten years ago and I’m still very annoyed about it when I think of it. My poor ds was devastated. It took us another year before we were ready to get another cat.

@thelovelyview that is appalling behaviour on their part, can’t get over it really how someone can do such a thing. Disgusting humans 🤬

I used to have the fussiest fuss pot of a cat. She used to hang around outside at school time, waiting for attention from passing children. I had to stop letting her out because of the amount of posts on social media about this stray cat.

She was fine! Normal cat weight, wearing a collar, she was a tad scruffy but some cats are (like the children who end up with twigs in their hair).

I had visions of someone running off with her.

Our pet sitter had a lovely cat with some kind of long term illness that meant it couldn't eat normal food or have any kind of normal medication. She regularly posted to say not to feed it or take it in. Someone found it, fed it normal food and gave it a flea and worm spot on treatment, the poor cat died because of it the same day (I mean it was obviously very ill from it's long term health condition but still). Our waitrose has a cat which clearly has a bed, waitrose standard cat food and loads of attention (I'd love to live at waitrose tbh, it must eat better than we do), that also gets loads of "really worried about this cat" - I'm just not sure what they're on about given how happy and healthy it is
People are quite mad. I think it's the attention seeking aspect of social media, the hope that someone goes "oh my God you've saved my cat, we thought we'd never see him again but you, you absolute genius, have found him for us" the lure of all that positive and public feedback is too great for people...

I think it's a good thing you now have to have a cat microchipped - at least it's easy to find out!

But my former MIL was awful for this. 'Oh, the cat looks lost, I just fed it a little and then I fed it some more and then it wouldn't go away! Oh goodness! What do I do now?' She pretended she really didn't understand it was stealing someone else's pet.

We get this too. What is it that makes a cat look lost? Are they holding their maps upside down? Are they half way up a mountain wearing flip flops and hot pants? Are they meowing in fluent Russian in Essex?

It's baffling.

Yup. I work in animal rescue and unless an cat is obviously injured or sick we advise people to use a paper collar first to see if a cat is owned. A lot of people don't realise cats are treated as property in law, so if you take in or encourage a cat to live with you and it has an owner you are actually stealing someone's property. I hate seeing on MN or elsewhere that whole "the cat has chosen you" as I know how devastating it is to lose a cat only to discover actually someone was feeding her in the next street and that's why she wasn't coming home.

cats are rarely lost, they just visit other gardens like people visit other restaurants for a change.

To be fair, near us there was one cat that did board the Stansted Express and end up at the airport. It had a reputation locally on FB though and was recognised as it boarded and the owner contacted.

That made me laugh out loud!

I popped a post up last year about a cat in my garden because she used to visit but suddenly she was visiting daily and sleeping under my lawn mower in the rain I was checking more on her owner than her as she seemed a bit less....taken care of? And like I said she was an infrequent visitor at best turns out the owner had been a little unwell and the cat didn't like the sitter she was really old that's why she was looking a bit raggedy I never fed her stroked her or encouraged her she went back when her owner did