November 18, 2008

After 13 years of wandering the streets only miles from his owners' home, George the cat, who is microchipped, was reunited with his owners two weeks ago.(Pet Pulse Photo Courtesy of Frank Warburg. Illustration by Tim Mattson)

SANTA ROSA, Calif. -- George, the cat, proved to have nine lives and then some, after the lost Russian Blue reunited with his family two weeks ago.

George first went missing from his owners' northern California property in 1995.

The micro-chipped cat, who had mainly been living on the streets the entire time, was located a mere three-and-a-half-miles from his Santa Rosa home.

The time away, though, has taken a toll on the feeble and elderly cat, who refuses to eat and is very ill, his owner Frank Walburg said.

"It's uncertain whether he is going to survive this, but maybe the miracle of the story is that he came back to say goodbye," Walburg said.

George and his siblings were rescued as stray kittens by Walburg and his wife, Melinda, in 1991. They spayed and neutered the four kittens before taking them all into their home.

Melinda Walburg, who has worked with various humane societies and rescue groups, also insisted on microchipping the kittens, an unusual decision for the time.

"It wasn't something people did a lot back then," Frank Walburg said. "At the time, microchipping, especially for cats, was a pretty rare thing."

George was microchipped by American Veterinary Identification Devices, which was founded in the mid 1980s. Though several million animals were microchipped by the early 1990s -- as opposed to the several hundred million pets in the U.S. that are microchipped today -- George's tale marks one of the company's most miraculous reunion stories, AVID representative Dr. Daniel Knox says.

AVID receives around 2,000 calls per day identifying lost microchipped pets.

"This is really one of our oldest pet recoveries," Knox said. "We have seen pets getting reunited with their families after eight, nine or 10 years. But 13 years is certainly pushing a new record."

Initially, it seemed like George would only be remembered as a cat lost forever, not a miraculous exception.

Following the six-month mark of George's disappearance, Frank Walburg began to think "it would be pretty uncommon if we saw him again," he said.

After the second year without George, Walburg "felt miniscule to no probability that we would see him again," and by the sixth, he said "he was sure that something had happened."

"I knew there was never going to be a reunion. I put it in the back of my mind," he said.

That was until Tuesday, Nov. 4, when Walburg received a call from his veterinarian of 17 years, informing him that a local humane society had George.

Though George was a "shadow of himself from 1995," Walburg knew immediately that the emaciated cat was his own.

"It was just incredible," Walburg said. "We cried on the way to the shelter. Just, what are the chances that in the past 17 years we haven't moved, and that for the past 17 years we have been using the same vet?"

Walbug learned a neighborhood woman had been occasionally feeding George and his stray friends, but that the cat had largely survived on his own. The woman had, however, taken George, on three separate occasions, to different veterinarians -- and none of them bothered to scan the stray for a chip.

The past 13 years whittled the previously 13-pound cat down to a mere six. Upon return, George has now been diagnosed with an upper respiratory infection. His daily treatment for it has left him debilitated, Walburg says.

Nevertheless, George, who is being force fed with a syringe, recognized his home, owners and sister, Grace. On his first night home, he drank from the same water bowl he had as a kitten.

The family that waited so long to see their cat again will now try its best to nurse George back to health, Walburg said. He became emotional throughout the course of a 1-hour interview, as he described George's present condition, a weak, flat note in a long journey.

He also faulted the veterinarians who treated what they thought was a stray cat and never scanned for microchip identification.

"What the vets did was not cool," Walburg said. "It wasn't right. If the vets did what they promised they were going to when they receive a stray, there would be many more reunions at quicker rates out there."

Melinda Walburg is documenting George's progress on her Web site. To follow up on George's tale, visit Pet-helpers.com.

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