Many People Help To Reunite Tsunami Lost Cat

This is a Japanese black cat story.  For me the outstanding aspect of it is the number of people who helped to reunite a black cat who was lost after the Japanese tsunami that destroyed the nuclear reactor  3 years ago.  You may remember the disaster and trying to contain the radioactive material from the destroyed reactors. Many cats and dogs were abandoned in fact.

Photo copyright Asahi Shimbun / Wataru Sekita

Mr and Mrs Yamagishi were lucky to escape the devastation of the tsunami.  Their home survived unlike the rest of the town in which they lived.  However, their much loved black cat Suika was nowhere to be seen.

I'd just like to make a comment about their black cat. Suika has a notably different appearance to your typical Western random bred cat.  His facial appearance is different but I can't put a finger on the difference right now.

The couple searched for their cat high and low without success for 3 months.  And then about a month ago another couple saw a black cat in a pine forest.  He wore a collar. They took him to a local health centre.  No one claimed  the cat.  So they kindly put an advert in the local paper.  So, thus far there's been a couple and a health centre and a newspaper involved in his reunion.

Then somebody noticed faded letters on the cat's collar.  The faded letters were the name and telephone number of Mr and Mrs Yamagishi.

From that point on it was easy going.  As you can see there was quite a chain of events and people involved in reuniting this cat with his owner.  I'm very impressed with that.  At any stage someone could have given up and the reunion wouldn't have happened.

I suppose the key element in the reunion is the collar.  Without that I'm not sure it would have happened.  This leads to the obvious point which is that any outdoor cat or even full-time indoor cats should have some sort of identification on them because you never know what might happen.

It seems that Suika was not micro-chipped, which is probably the best form of identification other than an identifying tattoo in the cat's ear.  Tattoos are safer than microchips as it happens because there are some incidences of micro-chipping causing problems at the site of the microchip.  Also, there is a need for an updated database for microchipping to be effective.

In some ways you can't beat the old-fashioned cat collar.