Six years ago, Amanda Flores lost her cat, Monkey Face. The woman, who had given up on finding her missing pet, was skeptical when she received a call from animal care services in San Antonio, Texas.
The shelter informed him that they had found Monkey Face. She couldn’t believe it. It’s been a while.
Director of Public Relations and Outreach Lisa Norwood told The Epoch Times that Flores agreed to come to the San Antonio Animal Care Services shelter and see for herself after being assured that the flea Monkey Face email confirmed his identity.
The reunion took place on November 26, 2021, just after Thanksgiving. When Flores saw her cat, skepticism quickly turned to laughter and tears of joy. He hugged his pet again after so many years.
A cat that disappeared 6 years ago has found its owner
“San Antonio Animal Care Services had to do a lot of investigative work,” Norwood said. ” he told the staff he couldn’t believe they had found Monkey Face after all this time. It was obvious she was happy to have her cat back.
Norwood said Monkey Face’s reaction was “like a cat, a little lukewarm” at first. But she was purring when she left that day in the arms of her owner.
Reunions like this “do not happen by chance,” he said, adding that they are “part of the hard work” that local animal shelters do every day.
The hard work that brought Flores and her pet together required a healthy dose of perseverance and courageous investigative skills.
Norwood said Monkey Face was first located on Nov. 14, 2021, near the entrance to a neighborhood west of San Antonio. Animal protection officer Adan Perez responded to a call about an injured cat and found Monkey Face gasping for air and unable to walk or stand. It looked like she had been hit by a car.
As part of the procedure, Officer Pérez scanned Monkey Face for a microchip to verify if he had an owner. Microchipping is currently mandatory for all dogs and cats in San Antonio. By matching the microchip to the Animal Care Services database, Agent Perez found an address and the owner’s name: Amanda Flores.
However, Amanda had changed direction. When Officer Perez knocked on the door, the man who answered said no one named Flores lived there. Also, I didn’t know anyone by that name and there was no one in the house who had a cat. The search for Agent Pérez was over. He took the injured cat to the shelter’s clinic for evaluation and treatment.
When a microchip is not registered or linked to current contact information, Norwood says animal care services have a few options to try to locate the owner. One option is to wait for the owner to come to the shelter to pick up the animal. However, Norwood says it’s less common in cats, due to their natural tendency to wander.
“A cat ‘missing’ for a few days may seem less unusual than a lost dog,” he said. “In those cases, where a microchip can’t facilitate an immediate reunion, San Antonio Animal Services has to do a lot of detective work, but instead of being a missing person, it’s a missing pet.”
And so, it’s the second option: the investigation begins.
San Antonio Animal Care Services staff use their internal database and work with many microchip vendors and their databases to track leads. They ask questions, compare data, and cross-reference phone numbers, addresses, utility records, etc., ultimately returning lost animals to their owners.
“In the case of Monkey Face, it took us about two weeks to do that detective work before we got an answer,” Norwood explains.
Moreover, it arrived just in time. When she was recovered, Monkey Face had been treated with painkillers and placed in a “rest cage”. Four days later, he was able to get up and walk again. When Animal Care Services located his owner, recovering Monkey Face was waiting for him at the cat shelter.
The sweet scene of Flores and Monkey Face reuniting after six years reminds Norwood why the San Antonio Animal Shelter works hard to help animals in their community.
Norwood said the City of San Antonio Municipal Shelter is one of the largest animal shelters in the country and is an open-admission facility that receives about 30,000 animals a year. Its adoption rate has been over 90% over the past five years.
Their mission: “to do everything in our power to make San Antonio a safe place for animals and people”.
Norwood encourages readers to visit www.saacs.net to learn more about the San Antonio shelter, to see the animals they care for, or to make a donation to help foster more gatherings like Flores and Monkey Face.