Jan Franklin says having Rascal home is a dream come true.
Jan Franklin says having Rascal home is a dream come true.
If cats could talk, Rascal the black and white cat would certainly have a tale to tell.
The adventurous feline went walkabout over a year ago, and until last weekend had not been seen since.
On Saturday morning, a year and ten days since he was last seen, Rascal wasback with his owners, Jan and Linz Franklin.
Jan says Rascal's return was something she and Linz never gave up hoping for.
In the year he'd been gone they had never given up hope for finding their beloved fur baby, one of the eight cats they share their Stratford home with.
Their appeal to find him featured in the Stratford Press last year, and Jan says she and Linz spent hours walking around the area looking for him.
The search for Rascal featured in the Stratford Press almost a year ago.
"Both of us never really gave up on finding Rascal. We had put up missing pet notices everywhere, on TradeMe, on every social media missing pet page we could find. We logged it with the New Zealand Companion Animal Register as well, which records pet microchip numbers to help find them. Every month we would get the notice to renew them and we did."
It was one of the Facebook pages, New Zealand Lost Pet Register (NZLPR) that helped Jan and Linz reunite with Rascal on Saturday, says Jan.
"I woke up to my phone pinging, with all these messages from Facebook and people tagging me in posts on there. Tracey Burnell had posted on the page with pictures of a cat that had turned up at her parents on Pembroke Rd, and it looked just like Rascal."
Jan messaged Tracey who then tried calling the cat by the name Rascal.
"She said he immediately looked at her, so we were sure it was him."
Other than a sore nose, Rascal seems to have come out of his adventure unscathed.
Jan and Linz drove to meet Tracey at her parent's place as quickly as possible.
"When we got there he'd disappeared, but we called his name and he came running straight to us, he came and started nudging at our legs and smooching us like he had never been away."
While they had no doubt it was Rascal, a vet visit to scan his microchip confirmed it.
"He needed a vet check anyway as obviously he had been missing for over a year, he has lost weight, has a sore nose and a dose of worms, but is otherwise absolutely fine."
Both Jan and Tracey are full of praise for the NZLPR Facebook page, with Tracey saying it made the process really easy to put up the post with a picture of Rascal.
Jan says having Rascal back is a dream come true, and she advises anyone with a missing pet to make sure they register it with all the missing pet pages possible.
"Especially the New Zealand Lost Pets Register, Rascal is proof it works."
Rascal had only shown up at Tracey's parent's place last week, so a mystery still exists as to where he has been for the past 12 months.
"We'd love to know how did he get there and where was he in the meantime. He was only 4km away from our house, but we don't know how he got there or what happened over the last year."
If cats could talk: Rascal is keeping quiet on just what he got up to in the past year.
Only Rascal really knows just what he got up to in the past year and 10 days, and it seems he isn't telling.
