Microchip Returns San Francisco Cat After 9 Years

January 5, 2013

A San Francisco cat, living on the last year of his nine lives, was finally reunited with family members after being lost for 9 long years.

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Vanilla, a Siamese feline was lost nine years ago and presumed to be gone forever, that is until a Sausalito vet scanned the pussy cat’s microchip.

Turns out the cat had been shacked-up for almost an entire decade with a man recently diagnosed with dementia. In December a caretaker pawned the sick man’s found cat, Vanilla, over to the San Francisco Department of Animal Care and Control.

“We don’t know how he got Vanilla at all, but we took him into custody because his then owner wasn’t able to take care of him,” said Kristen Hall, a worker with Animal Care and Control.

Vanilla had a microchip embedded in her skin imprinted with the same cellphone number currently owned by her original family…

“Whenever an animal comes in, the yet scans them for microchips. Vanilla had a microchip and it did not match up to the person he had been living with, which was the man that had been hospitalized. But it matched up to Dara, who had the same cellphone as all those years ago.”

Since losing Vanilla, her original owners had moved to Topanga, Calif., but luckily had never changed her cellphone number and now Vanilla is home, for real.

“I just got a call. It was the best Christmas present our family got,” said one family member, “We got a call from an officer at the animal control and asked if I was the owner of a cat named Vanilla. And I was like, ‘Well, yeah, a really long time ago.’ We were literally jumping around and screaming and going bananas. We were absolutely devastated when he went missing.”

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