Mu Finds Snickers

Be sure to check under the hood if your cat is missing.

Mu Finds Snickers

I was trying to write the story of how Mu found Snickers, but Mu was making it difficult.  He came over to my chair, and looked deep into my eyes, as if he might tell be a profound secret, or tell me that he loves me, and then he burped.  I said, “Thank you, Mu.  That was very nice.”  Then he turned and sat with he back to me, so I could rub his shoulders.  After a bit, he flopped his head over backwards and looked at me upside down.  He has a very bendy neck, and can flop his head over any which way.  So I was trying to type, and Mu kept nudging my hand with his upside down head, insisting that petting him was more important than work.  I don’t disagree.  Eventually, he went to lie down for another nap so I could tell the story of Snickers.

On Tuesday, March 5th, 2019, Mu and Tino and I went to Kent, WA, to search for Snickers.  Snickers has been blind from birth, and of course she is an indoor only cat.  Four days earlier, she got out of a door that was accidentally left open.  Her family searched thoroughly for her, and they were especially anxious to find her because of her being blind.  They didn’t find out about Mu until the third day, and they called me right away.  I told them that normally I wouldn’t say they need to be in a huge hurry to use the search dog for a lost cat, but I agreed that Snickers’ condition made it more urgent than usual, and I would be out the next day.

Snickers was lost in an condo complex in Kent.  I had searched there before, and I knew about the swamp full of hiding places.  They also said that some of the buildings had crawl space screens that were broken or missing, so a cat could get in there to hide.  I tried Tino first, using some fur collected from where Snickers would sleep.  Tino led me in a big loop, about 800 feet total, coming back to where we started.  Its possible Snickers did really wander that loop in the four days she was missing, or perhaps the scent trail was too old, or the scent article contaminated.  At any rate, we hadn’t pinpointed the cat.  Mu and I started near their unit, checking around cars and shrubs, and checking the crawl spaces.  This complex has a man made lake, with steep sides made of brick.  The hard edge rises up about 16 inches above the water level.  I worried about what would happen if a blind cat fell into the lake.  I looked around for any signs of a body, or perhaps scratch marks of a cat trying to get out.  Mu didn’t show any interest in the lake, so that was possibly a good sign.

As we worked our way around the complex, I had Mu check all of the screens to the crawl spaces.  In the past, he has been able to pinpoint cats in crawl spaces, often telling me which corner the cat is in.  Mu said there were no cats in the first four buildings we checked.  When we got to the swamp, we went around the edges until we could find a break in the blackberries.  When new buildings are constructed, these parcels are set aside as “Native Growth Protection Areas,” as if it somehow compensates for the harm against the environment caused by the building and paved areas.  If these set asides remained full of native plants and wildlife habitat, then it would certainly be some mitigation.  Inevitably, these swampy areas fill up with invasive blackberries, and the native plants are almost always choked out.  These “Native Growth Protection Areas” do very little to protect the environment, although I suppose it could be argued that they are better than more pavement or lawns.  What these NGPAs are really good at is providing a place for lost cats to hide in impenetrable thickets of brambles.  If you were a lost cat, looking for safety, you would only need to look for the nearest “Native Growth Protection Area” sign, and you would find acres of blackberries to hide in.  As we worked our way around the edges, the wind was fairly strong coming off the artificial lake, helping Mu to smell a cat deeper into the brambles.  He has been able to smell a cat from as far away as 100 feet when the wind is right.  We found a break in the blackberries and made our way into the middle of the swampy thicket.  We searched not only for Snickers, but also for any sign that she may have come to harm.  I looked on the thorns, down at cat height, for any tufts of her gray and brown fluffy fur.  Mu and I didn’t find anything in the swamp, although we weren’t able to easily access all of it.  Before trying to hack our way into the middle of the thicket, I wanted to check a few more buildings and their crawl spaces.

As we were finishing one building and coming around the corner of the next building, Mu whined as we passed a large SUV.  It was an older model, like a Suburban, and it seemed dusty, as if it hadn’t moved in days.  I let Mu work around all sides of the engine compartment and the wheel wells.  The more he sniffed, the more he started to whine.  He put his nose right up to the cracks and sniffed hard, pulling air out of the engine compartment, as if he could extract the cat from her hiding place by sniffing her out, molecule by molecule.  Mu’s analysis told me there was a cat toward the front, fairly low.  I looked underneath, and I saw long gray strands of fur caught on the axles and cross members in places.  Although I couldn’t see what cat was in the engine compartment, the presence of bits of fur similar to that of Snickers suggested this was most likely her.  Also, it was about 100 feet from the point of escape, so it would be a plausible place for a blind cat to hide.  I took Mu back to our car, and got the plumber’s camera.  This is a camera and light mounted on a long, flexible probe.  Plumbers use it to check pipes for clogs, or to look inside walls for leaks.  It’s an excellent tool to find cats in certain situations.  In this case, I poked it into an opening in the metal, and I saw fur.  I couldn’t see enough of the animal to say for sure that it was Snickers, but there was definitely some animal wedged in there.

The owners came, and the wife slid right under the SUV to see if it was Snickers.  Using a flashlight, and peering through various cracks and gaps, she was finally able to find the head of the animal, and confirm that it was Snickers.  She talked to Snickers, but her cat remained silent, as cats often do in stressful situations.  We asked various residents if they knew who owned the truck, and it seemed that the vehicle’s owners weren’t home yet.  Snickers’ owners called the police and animal control to see if there was any way to get into the SUV to pop the hood release, but there didn’t seem to be anything to do but wait for the owners to come home from work.  They thanked me for finding their cat, and they said I could leave.  I was reluctant to go until I knew the cat was home safe.  Cats can sometimes bolt from their hiding places, and we might be needed to track her down again.  However, since Snickers is blind, I figured that she wouldn’t be able to run very far or very fast, and as long as one person stood guard until they could pop the hood, it would probably be okay.

As we drove on to the next assignment, I couldn’t help thinking of the last cat I had found in an engine compartment, Bronwyn.  On Christmas Day, 2018, Mu and I went to search for a Siamese cat in Snoqualmie.  It was an overcast day, upper thirties to low forties, perfect weather for searching.  Bronwyn had been missing several days.  She had gotten out a door that was left open accidentally.  Mu and I started searching for her, looking in places that would offer concealment for a frightened cat.  The crawl space of a nearby school was the perfect place, and there was cat fur on the edge of the broken screen, but Mu said there were no cats in there.  Behind Bronwyn’s house, Mu found a Siamese cat that looked very much like Bronwyn to me.  We stayed back, and I called the owner over.  She said it was the cat who lived there, who just happened to look similar to Bronwyn.  We worked our way around the neighborhood, and I kept track of our path on GPS so that, if we skipped over anything, we could come back and search it.

We came to the storm drain system in front of Bronwyn’s house, and Mu sniffed at the one-inch hole in the manhole cover.  Mu sniffed so deeply that I imagined a cat being sucked up and stuck to the bottom surface of the manhole cover.  I put Mu in the car and used the plumber’s camera to peek through the hole.  I could see cat eyes.  We got tools and pried the heavy cover off, and I went down into the storm drain system to see if it was Bronwyn.  It turned out to be Junior, the black cat who lived in the neighborhood.  We saw where he got in an out of the storm drain system through the outlet pipe that drained to the nearby Native Growth Protection Area.

We kept searching down the block, and Mu alerted strongly on an overturned metal tub.  Knowing there was definitely a cat under there, I pulled him back away, so he wouldn’t upset the cat.  Bronwyn’s owner came over, and I told her to check under the tub very slowly, so if the cat under there was Bronwyn, she wouldn’t be spooked away.  It was Bronwyn!  In spite of her owner being very careful, Bronwyn did bolt.  From a distance, I saw her turn the corner.  I put Mu in the car again, not wanting to make Bronwyn feel hunted, and I checked the hiding places closest to where she turned the corner.  There were three trucks parked in a yard, and I asked the homeowner if we could pop the hoods to see if Bronwyn was in any of the engine compartments.  In the third truck we checked, I opened up the hood, and there was Bronwyn, staring at me with her intense blue eyes.  She froze and I froze, but before I could think of what to do, she bolted again.  After 20 minutes or so, I found her again, under a board by a rotten fence.  She scurried under, and hid under some boards in a pile of lumber.  Knowing where she was, I wanted to proceed very slowly, to avoid making her run again.  I had Bronwyn’s owner come and sit on the ground, about ten feet away, where Bronwyn could see her, and just talk softly.  This has worked in the past, and cats have come out to their owners if allowed 20-40 minutes to calm down.  After at least half an hour of this, I had an idea to get Bronwyn into a humane trap.  Using a fishing net on a pole, I could block her path of escape in all directions except into the trap.  We got it all lined up, I gave Bronwyn a gentle nudge to get her moving, and she started to go into the trap.  About half way in, she stopped, and she turned and wriggled out through a gap I hadn’t thought she would fit through.  She was on the run again.

Having dislodged her from four different hiding places, I didn’t want to keep antagonizing her.  I advised that we should set several traps with wildlife cameras, and she would probably go in during the night, when all was quiet and calm.  We never saw Bronwyn again.  She never showed up on any of the cameras.  Mu and I came back two more times over the next month, to search again, widening the search area.  We found many good hiding places where she could have been, but we never found her.  Bronwyn’s owner was crushed, to be so close to having her, and she escaped.  Looking back on how I handled it, I see things that I could have done differently, hindsight being 20-20.  Maybe my plan to get her in the trap was a good one, but it just didn’t work.  I have told Bronwyn’s owner that she is most likely still alive, according to the data I have collected over the years, and she still has a chance of finding her.  Cats can survive all sorts of conditions, and Bronwyn had been on the streets before her most recent life as an indoor cat.  They are still looking for her, but they are heartbroken about having lost her, found her, and lost her again.

I was really hoping not to hear about anything like that happening with Snickers, and I was very relieved to get the text message that Snickers was safe inside the house.  It wasn’t Mu’s fault that Bronwyn was lost again, and it wouldn’t have been Mu’s fault if Snickers escaped the SUV.  Maybe it would be nobody’s fault.  People do the best they can, and it doesn’t always work out.  Still, it felt redeeming for Mu to have found the blind cat concealed in an engine compartment, and to have her successfully brought to safety.

I am telling these stories of Mu for selfish reasons, of course.  I love him to pieces, and I enjoy bragging about him.  I also want to tell stories of his adventures so others can learn from our experience.  If people would check under the hoods of their cars to look for a lost cat, perhaps thousands more cats could be found safely and quickly.  If people don’t check under the hoods of nearby cars, how many lost cats are accidentally transported away, only to climb out of the engine compartment in a strange, distant neighborhood?  According to records I have kept since 2008, and according to the experience of others who search for lost cats, most lost cats will be found within 500 feet of the point they were last seen.  Indoor only cats, especially, are likely to be found close to home.  Cats who roam outdoors are sometimes found farther away.  Although I don’t have exact numbers, I am confident that less than 15% of lost cats are found wandering more than a mile from home.  I suspect, although I don’t have concrete proof, that most of those cats got so far from home by being accidentally transported in a vehicle.

If your cat is missing, or if your neighbor’s cat is missing, you should try to check under the hoods of as many cars as possible.  Before your neighbors go to work the next day, you should spread the word to as many as possible that they should check under their hoods, or at least bang on the hood loudly before getting in and starting the engine.  If my cat was missing, and I wasn’t able to talk to all my neighbors quickly enough, I would put a flyer on each of their windshields, telling them of my lost cat, and asking them to bang on the hood before starting the engine.  Although we didn’t catch Bronwyn, at least she wasn’t transported out of the area under the hood of that truck.  Snickers was lucky, a blind cat who happened to pick the one car in the complex that was parked for an extended period.  Snickers’ family walked right by her, looking for her, probably a dozen times, and they never knew she was there.  A cat detection dog like Mu can find cats in engine compartments, but we can’t find all of the dozens of cats that go missing every day in a typical city, so please check under hoods.  If you hear of a neighbor who has lost a cat, or perhaps see a Facebook post about a lost cat, advise them to check under hoods sooner rather than later.  If a cat is in a crawlspace or in the bushes or in a tree or in a Native Growth Protection Area, there is time find her there, eventually.  If she is hiding in the engine compartment of a car, it is very important to have people check before any of those cars drive off.