A Utah couple accidentally wrapped up a box of Amazon returns while their cat was inside. Six days later she was freed in an Amazon warehouse in California:
Carrie Clark said her family’s indoor-only cat, Galena, mysteriously disappeared on April 10. Friends and family helped them search their house, neighborhood and surrounding community for a week while they plastered missing posters around town and on social media.
....Then, on April 17, Clark received a text that Galena’s microchip had been scanned that afternoon. Immediately after, imagine Clark’s surprise when she received a call from a vet — in California.... “I ran to tell my husband that Galena was found and we broke down upon realizing that she must have jumped into an oversized box that we shipped out the previous Wednesday,” Clark said. “The box was a ‘try before you buy,’ and filled with steel-toed work boots.”
As is so often the case in these stories, the cat was basically fine. It's remarkable how well cats can survive being stuck in weird places for a week or more and come out of it suffering nothing more than mild dehydration.
Also, cats are idiots.
Stories like this are basically the reason I am extremely careful about anything going into or out of my home. I have two indoor cats, one of whom is a FIP survivor with nascent immune system issues. It terrifies me that they might get out (or be taken out) in a manner like this, so we have strict procedures for entering that leaving the house as well as taking out trash, etc.
I can't imagine what that family went through, but at least the story had a happy ending. It would have been far more heartbreaking if their beloved pet had perished on the trip.
Also, chip your pets everyone.
correction: cats are assholes not idiots
Indeed.
My cat is an idiot, sure, but she'd never pack me off in a box to the West Coast.
Mine just might, if she wasn't dumber than a pile of dryer lint.
My larger cat would be likely to be packed into a box to be shipped, but he'd never make it past the first shipping point. He's a very noisy, complain-y cat who wants his food and water NOW! when it's suppertime.
I don't suppose anyone asked Amazon about the frequency of this occurring.
Reminds me of a story some years ago, where a couple stopped at a gas stations. The husband got out to get some gas, and then went in inside the store. He came out of the store, got in the car, and started driving -- not noticing that his spouse was not in the car. For two hundred miles!
Oh, he noticed, all right. He just claimed that he didn't.
😄😄😄 Probably noticed after 100 miles. Then spent the next 100 miles figuring out how not to be killed by his wife.
Remember, cats are fickle and love others homes as much as their own.
“suffering nothing more than mild dehydration”
Believe me, that cat was seriously embarrassed when they took it out of that box.
F***ing Meeowww….
The cat may have been seriously embarrassed, but you can bet the mood he was projecting was "I meant to do that".
Exactly!!
Kevin: you were doing meooooow great until your last comment bout kitties. No need to be meooooow insulting. Kitties know.
Which would make their human staff morons.
suffering nothing more than mild dehydration”…except when cats get dehydrated they often suffer from Kidney disease. Having several out door cats I have seen this first hand after the idiot cats go into a garage on spring Sunday when the kids are out playing and get caught for several days when door shuts and doesn’t open again until the kids are free to play again.
And heart disease.
Still, cats are amazingly resilient, because in the wild their hunts would not always work.
I imagine those work boots might be unusable now, though, lol.
Also, cats do not care what you think.
...and murderers.
People, people - here I thought that many of you were fans of Hopper, Hilbert, & Charlie, only being somewhat rude about Kevin Drum's supposed Republican-adjacent ideology.
And after the original insult to felines in general, seeing no comments then, hadn't planned to return, knowing full well that, aside from their propensity to hide in places such as boxes, they are more intelligent than many species, or why would we serve them?
Customer opens box, looks inside and to their surprise finds something they did not purrchase. Could have been a catastrophe! 🙀
A while back a couple we knew were remodeling their home and, in the process, tore down walls and rebuilt walls and one day their cat went.....missing. The cat was MIA for 2 days. Then all of a sudden during the quiet of the evening they heard a muffled "meow" from inside a wall. The wall was broken, and the cat rescued. I was told that the cat had a rather annoyed smug expression as if to say, "dumb humans plastered me into a wall - what will they do next?"
You can't expect much sophistication from a creature with a brain the size of a walnut.