The cat came back: Montreal owners reunite with Indie, feline missing for 8 years

MONTREAL — Indie the cat did indeed come back, but it took her about eight years and a little help from the Ottawa Humane Society.

After years on the lam and with memories of adventures only she knows about, an 11-year-old tuxedo cat has been reunited with her Montreal family after being found by a passerby in Ottawa.

“We were very shocked,” Stephen Smith, a spokesman for the humane society, said in an interview Wednesday. “Of course, it’s not too unusual for us to reunite an animal after, say, a few months or a couple of weeks. But when it gets into the time frame of years, that’s when it becomes a little bit more shocking.”

How Indie ended up in the country’s capital, about 165 kilometres west of Montreal, remains a mystery.

Smith said Indie was brought to them by a community member as a stray on July 16 after she was picked up in the city’s Gloucester suburb.

The animal’s embedded microchip allowed shelter staff to track down her Montreal owners, who he said were “floored” when they got a call to say Indie had been found. They were reunited late last week.

“It was a really touching moment,” Smith said. “The owner actually did begin to cry when they saw Indie, and Indie was clearly very happy to see him as well too: she was all cuddles and love and just instantly wanted to see her family.”

The cat was in good shape despite being away from home for so long. Smith said she was very friendly too.

“I’d have to imagine that at some point a person had picked her up and started caring for her and potentially brought her to Ottawa, but again, there’s just no way for us to know exactly what that looked like,” Smith said.

Smith said that in Ottawa, about 60 to 70 per cent of stray dogs but only 10 per cent of stray cats have microchips. The happy ending for Indie’s owners, he said, shows “the power of the microchip, where if that information is up to date, even when the cat’s been separated for that long, there’s still a chance they can get home.”

Indie’s owners were not immediately available for comment.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 24, 2024.

Sidhartha Banerjee, The Canadian Press