Mu Finds Cary

Safe after two weeks in hiding.

Mu Finds Cary

On Monday, we received a request for help for a lost gray cat named Cary, in Kenmore.  He had been missing 10 days already by the time Cary’s owner, Vera, learned that there was a search dog who specializes in finding lost cats.  I called Vera on Tuesday to learn more about Cary’s situation.  It was highly unusual in many respects.  Cary went out about 9:30 AM, which was normal for him, but he usually would come back before too long.  At noon, Vera tried to track him down via his Apple AirTag.  She found it a few blocks away in someone’s yard, near a busy street.  The locating device seemed completely undamaged, but it was out of its holder.  Normally it would take two hands and significant force, to get the tracker out of the holder.  What events could explain the AirTag being there and Cary being gone?  It seemed intentional, but any scenario I could imagine seemed equally implausible.

Vera asked around and she learned that a neighbor just south of where the AirTag was found had a woman come to his door saying, “I think I just hit your cat with my car!”  They searched around for his cat, who was later found, safe and unhurt.  It must have been Cary that the woman thought she may have struck.  Vera looked all around the area but could not find Cary, dead or alive.

When Vera asked if I thought the search dog could help, I told her, probably not.  If the AirTag was popped out of its holder, pristine and undamaged, it seems like that could only happen if someone picked up Cary and deliberately removed his AirTag, to avoid being tracked.  I’d never heard of something like that happening before.  Cary is a nice cat, but he’s not rare or particularly valuable, if someone were to try to sell him.  It seems unlikely a person would just pull over and decide to kidnap him, out of the blue. Plus, he wouldn’t normally just let a stranger pick him up and take him away.  It was a mystery.  I couldn’t picture a situation where Cary would be in the area.  I mean, if the woman on the busy street really did hit Cary with her car, and he was injured or dead, why would the AirTag be just sitting in someone’s yard, undamaged?  Mu’s next opening for a search was Thursday, two weeks after Cary disappeared.  I told Vera I thought it was unlikely Mu would be able to find Cary, given that it seemed someone had deliberately removed his tracking device.  Vera wanted us to come out and try, even if the odds were low.

On Thursday, Mu and I searched around the area where the AirTag was found.  If Cary’s harness was around, Mu would have located it.  If Cary had died, and his body had been near the AirTag, Mu would find evidence of that, even if scavengers had taken away the body.  Mu found no signs of anything in the yard where the tracking device was found.  We searched around neighboring properties.  There was an abandoned house and abandoned cars, which were perfect places for Cary to hide, but we didn’t find him there.  We followed a path into the woods, with lots of great hiding places, but no Cary.

I heard my car alarm going off, so I wanted to go back to my car and check it, especially because Tino was waiting in the car.  When we got there, Tino was fine, resting quietly, and the mirror was pivoted as if a passing vehicle had gotten too close and whacked the mirror, setting off the alarm, with no damage.  Very strange.  While we were by the car, Mu pulled me over to a laurel hedge.  He was very excited about this yard, about 100 feet southwest of where the AirTag was found.  As Mu and I were checking the hedge, Vera went to knock on the door, to make sure it was okay for us to search.  She had talked to the man previously and he had said it was okay, but we just wanted to make sure we weren’t going to startle anyone.

As Mu and I were sticking our heads in the hedge, and Vera was going up to knock on the door, the neighbor came over to ask what we were up to.  She seemed very suspicious of us.  When I explained that we were looking for Vera’s cat, and Mu is a search dog that specializes in finding lost cats, she gave us a look, like, “Yeah, right.”  I gave her my business card, which has my phone number and web page listed on it.  I explained that Mu had found hundreds of lost cats in his career.  She still seemed skeptical.  She tried to call her neighbor, who was out of town.  She couldn’t reach him.  She said we could search, but she would need to be there to supervise, since the owner was out of town and couldn’t be reached.  I had Vera keep watch on the street side of the hedge, and the neighbor kept watch near the house, just in case any cats popped out of the carport as we searched.  I told them that it would not be our goal to displace any cat in there, but they should be watching just in case. Mu and I searched around the outside of the carport, and he was very excited.  We went around and went in past the old boat and the old car.  There were benches and boxes and parts everywhere, with a million places for a cat to hide.  Mu was zeroing in on a strong scent.  Even I could smell a fairly strong scent of cat urine, as if a cat had spent some time in there, raising the odds that this could be Cary, and he was hiding in this carport full of junk for two weeks.  As Mu stepped up on a box to get closer to a scent, I heard the neighbor by the house yelling, “It’s him! It’s Cary! He just ran past me!”  She was no longer skeptical of Mu’s ability to locate lost cats!

Mu and I came out of the carport, and the neighbor showed where Cary had run under the deck.  He had been moving with an odd gait, almost crawling fast, with his right front leg out at an odd angle.  We called Vera in from the street, and as the women guarded each end of the deck, Mu went over the top to try to pinpoint Cary’s location underneath.  There were several points where Mu found pools of scent, but we couldn’t see Cary.  I put Mu in the car to wait, and I crawled under the deck to look for Cary with a flashlight.  We couldn’t find him.  I was worried he had run into the neighbor’s yard before we could pinpoint him.  I brought Mu back for another scent scan of the deck, and Mu pinpointed a corner of the deck close to the house, where a cat could get in deep and we couldn’t see.

I advised Vera that we should set a trap and camera and let Cary come out of his hiding spot when he was ready.  We put the trap under the deck with the camera watching it.  A full day passed with no sign of Cary.  Vera asked if Cary had just given up and crawled into a corner to die. Why wouldn’t he come to the food in the trap after two weeks of not eating?   I told her I thought it was unlikely that Cary had just given up.  Cats are tough.  When they have had a frightening experience, they will prefer to hide than to come out for food.  I thought we should give the trap and camera one more day to work before bringing Mu out to try to locate Cary again.

We had set the trap Thursday evening, about 5 PM.  Saturday evening at 8:35, the camera caught Cary moving about in the area of the trap.  I sent Vera the pictures and told her Cary would probably go in the trap soon.  At 3:57 Sunday morning, my phone pinged me with pictures of Cary going in the trap!  He was safe after 16 days.  They took him home inside the trap, and when they got him out, he was obviously injured.  His right front leg was broken or dislocated, and his left front leg was wounded.  Some of his teeth were broken or loose, and he had a wound on his head.  They took him to an emergency vet.  He weighed 8 pounds, having weighed 14 on the day he disappeared.  The doctors have sent his bloodwork off to be tested and they will probably do surgery on his broken leg soon.  As of this moment, the doctors are still trying to assess everything going on with Cary, but so far, nothing seems unfixable.

If Cary had remained in that carport much longer, if Mu hadn’t found him, it seems very likely that Cary would have died in his hiding spot.  People had already searched that carport, but it would have been impossible to find a hidden cat in there without the aid of a search dog’s nose.  Although it’s too soon to tell, I think Cary is going to pull through.  At least he has a chance now.  For Mu, it was all a fun game of finding kitties.  I wish I could tell Mu what a great job he did and that he probably saved Cary’s life.

As for the mystery of the pristine AirTag, it would seem that the force of the impact popped the AirTag out of its holder, undamaged.  Maybe the impact stretched the holder enough for an edge to pop out, and then when the rubber holder rebounded, it shot the little disc into the bushes?  The harness and holder were never found.  Although Cary was very unfortunate to be hit by a car, he was very lucky to have survived the impact, to have the AirTag tracker land, still functioning, where it could be found as a clue, and then to be located by the best cat-detection dog in the world.