My Neighborhood Cat

My cat Misty is an indoor-outdoor cat. She came to me that way, and I have experienced how unhappy she is when I have to confine her indoors for medical reasons. She gets in and out through a cat door I had installed next to my back door.

The cat door is locked, so I don't get visits from other cats or raccoons or rats. It unlocks when Misty touches it while wearing a key fob on her collar. When she loses her collar, I need to find it if I don't want to replace the collar, the key fob, and her ID tag.

These items being troublesome and costly to replace, I have accompanied them with a tracking tile that I can locate with an app on my phone. When the tile is close enough (its range is 50-100 feet), the app notifies me and the tile itself starts to play a musical tune. I use it most often to locate Misty while she's wearing the collar and I need to take her to the vet.

Twice in the past three months she has come knocking on her cat door without her collar and I have had to let her in the back door (and out again, and in again . . . ). The first time this happened, the tracking tile didn't work. In addition to a limited range, it has a limited life. It needs to be replaced every year or so, and I had heedlessly ignored a warning of its imminent expiration when it crossed my screen. I looked for the first collar in my back yard and asked my tenants to look for it. No dice.

So I bought her a new collar, adorned it with a backup cat door fob and the ID tag from my previous cat, and ordered new tracker tiles and cat door fobs. When the new tracker tiles appeared, I put one on her lovely new collar.

It was only another month or so before she came a-knocking at the cat door without the new collar. Grrrr. I fired up the tracking app on my phone and walked around the backyard. No luck.

Every so often, one of my neighbors stops me on the street to report seeing Misty in their backyard, or that she came into their home for a visit. So I figured she must have dropped the collar in one of their backyards. With the limited range of the tracker, though, I would not be able to find it from the sidewalk.

So I crossed my fingers and headed up my street towards neighbors who knew Misty. A few houses up the hill, I saw a vaguely familiar neighbor talking with someone else. When their conversation was over, I hailed the woman. Told her that my cat might have lost her collar in her backyard, and could I come and scan for it. She led me into her yard, the tracker went off, and we could hear the tile's music playing from the backyard next door. My neighbor, being taller than me, looked over the fence and saw the collar on a table in the yard. So we went next door and asked the ladies to retrieve the collar from their backyard. They did so, and we had a nice chat about how cats dislike wearing collars and how some have figured out how to use bushes to pull them off.

I rejoiced in having neighbors to help me take care of my pet, and made a mental note to promptly replace the tracker tile when I am warned that it may be  it running out of juice.