This cheeky hitchhiker has caused her owners an immeasurable amount of stress after going missing more than two years ago. The 5-year-old black cat Ruby ran away from her home in Brogborough, United Kingdom, in April 2018. The house was close to a truck stop on the M1 motorway, which made Ruby’s owner believe that she went away on a truck. Some two and a half years later, she has been reunited with her unsuspecting owner Jordan after being found around 60 miles away.
As it turned out, a security guard in Coventry had been unknowingly feeding a gorgeous black “stray” for three weeks before he decided to get the feline checked by Cats Protection, the UK’s leading cat welfare charity. The volunteers checked Ruby’s microchip only to find out she came all the way from Bedfordshire, which is roughly 60 miles away!
This cat had been missing since April 2018
Wendy Harris, a volunteer for Cats Protection for over 24 years, told Bored Panda: “Leighton Myers, a security guard on a local industrial estate, contacted us about a stray cat he had been feeding, and one of my volunteers Lorraine Conroy went out to scan her.” Wendy told us that she accessed the details on the database, but was unable to make a phone call since the phone number was unobtainable.
“So I sent an email to the listed email address asking the owner to contact me,” the volunteer told us. “We also advertised her on our lost and found Facebook page. After a couple of days, I sent a letter to the postal address.”
“Ruby wasn’t in a too bad condition, which is odd as there are no houses anywhere near there, but maybe someone from the industrial estate had been feeding her,” Wendy pondered.
60 miles away from her home, an unsuspecting security guard had been feeding the poor “stray” feline
At the time, the kind-hearted security guard was on vacation, so one of the volunteers for Cats Protection “was going up to the industrial estate to feed [Ruby] every day,” Wendy told Bored Panda. Then, the volunteers from Cat Protection from Bedford offered to go and knock on the door if there was a reply to Wendy’s letter.
“Her owner rang me as a result of the letter and at first thought it was a hoax, as she had been missing since April 2018,” the Cats Protection volunteer told us. “He said he would drive straight here to Coventry from Bedford, so Lorraine went back to where she was and tempted her in with food, then rang the owner, who set off. I went too,” Wendy revealed to Bored Panda.
But after volunteers scanned her microchip, it turned out the cat wasn’t a stray by any means
“When Jordan arrived, Ruby was straight to him. She really knew who he was—she was all over him,” the volunteer told us. “It really demonstrates how important it is to microchip your cats and to keep the details up to date,” she added.
Talking to the BBC, Ruby’s owner said: “No words can describe the happiness I’m feeling right now. I had little hope of finding her after nearly three years, but now she’s home safe and sound.”
