Florida resident Pamela Edwards was certain her new cat had been eaten by an alligator.
She adopted 3-year-old Cheyenne from her local animal shelter in the summer of 1997. By Thanksgiving that year, the cat had disappeared from Edwards' condominium in Bradenton on Florida's west coast. She hung flyers and ran ads in the newspaper, received no response and concluded the worst.
Cheyenne was just a distant memory when Edwards got a call from her county shelter three weeks ago. The cat had been found -- 3,000 miles away, in San Francisco.
"I figured, there's no way that's my Cheyenne," Edwards said. "I told them, 'I had a cat named Cheyenne, but I've never lived in San Francisco.' "
Someone found the black, short-haired cat strolling down Divisadero Street and dropped her at the Department of Animal Care and Control on April Fool's Day. When workers scanned her for a microchip and found she had been lost in Florida seven years earlier, they wondered if it was a gag.
"Maybe she came here on vacation because she wanted to see the Wine Country, and decided to stick around because it's not so muggy," joked Deb Campbell, spokeswoman for Animal Care and Control, as she cradled Cheyenne at her temporary home in the shelter.
The more probable, if prosaic, explanation is that a former neighbor of Edwards' found the cat, decided to keep her, then moved to San Francisco.
"She has glossy fur, good weight," Campbell said. "She definitely looks in good condition, so I don't think she walked here."
No one has contacted Animal Care and Control claiming to be Cheyenne's owner. And because the microchip identifies Edwards as the owner, she retains legal rights to the cat, Campbell said.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/04/22/BAGC767J0C13.DTL
She adopted 3-year-old Cheyenne from her local animal shelter in the summer of 1997. By Thanksgiving that year, the cat had disappeared from Edwards' condominium in Bradenton on Florida's west coast. She hung flyers and ran ads in the newspaper, received no response and concluded the worst.
Cheyenne was just a distant memory when Edwards got a call from her county shelter three weeks ago. The cat had been found -- 3,000 miles away, in San Francisco.
"I figured, there's no way that's my Cheyenne," Edwards said. "I told them, 'I had a cat named Cheyenne, but I've never lived in San Francisco.' "
Someone found the black, short-haired cat strolling down Divisadero Street and dropped her at the Department of Animal Care and Control on April Fool's Day. When workers scanned her for a microchip and found she had been lost in Florida seven years earlier, they wondered if it was a gag.
"Maybe she came here on vacation because she wanted to see the Wine Country, and decided to stick around because it's not so muggy," joked Deb Campbell, spokeswoman for Animal Care and Control, as she cradled Cheyenne at her temporary home in the shelter.
The more probable, if prosaic, explanation is that a former neighbor of Edwards' found the cat, decided to keep her, then moved to San Francisco.
"She has glossy fur, good weight," Campbell said. "She definitely looks in good condition, so I don't think she walked here."
No one has contacted Animal Care and Control claiming to be Cheyenne's owner. And because the microchip identifies Edwards as the owner, she retains legal rights to the cat, Campbell said.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/04/22/BAGC767J0C13.DTL
