Map My Cat

On the field with the dog this morning I met a very distressed woman and her elderly mother who were looking for their cat.  They had posters and leaflets and were talking to everyone they could see, looking in trees and beginning to despair.  He had disappeared on Saturday.  He was micro-chipped but that wouldn't help them find him unless he arrived dead or injured at a vets and no one wished for that.

My cat, Bilbo, used to wander.  He was a bit of an adventurer, always trying out new stunts and so it was amazing that he lived more than 15 years.  The first time we lost him we did worry.  He was only a few months old and had been missing for 3 days.  We went to ask a neighbour, who had the most gorgeous white, deaf cat called Harvey if  they had seen him.  While we were standing at the door talking we could hear a faint Meowing.  Looking up, we found Bilbo on top of the roof, sitting in place of a missing ridge tile.  Harvey  had been up there many times before and had led him up there and not shown him how to get down.

"Follow me!"

After that, Bilbo would regularly undertake what we used to call his 'hunting and fishing trips'.  We never knew where he went but he would come home after a while, sometimes tired, sometimes hungry, sometimes a little fatter and act as though he had never been anywhere.

When we went on holiday, the neighbours offered to feed the cats and were beside themselves with worry, as they hadn't seen him for 10 days but they needed have stressed because he was sitting on the doorstep waiting for us when we arrived home.  

Cats often get themselves trapped in places.  They wander in to an open garage, curl up for a sleep and find they can only get out a week later, when the owner opens the garage to get out the lawnmower again.  When I was a child, we had a cat who got stuck in my mum's wardrobe and couldn't get out.  I'm not sure how that happened but I always thought it had got wedged in amongst all the clothes my mum had hidden, so that she could tell my dad, "I've had it ages!"

Harvey once went to Dover.  He had crawled into a car through an open window and fallen asleep on the back seat.  Being deaf, he didn't hear the car start and it was only when he was spotted by a customs official the owners (of the car - not Harvey) realised that they wouldn't be catching their ferry until they had got Harvey home!

"It's a shame you can't track your animals," said the woman on the field.  I can see it now, the new i-phone app.  MAP MY CAT.  It would be a bit like map my walk, map my run and you could see just where your cat has been all day,  you could post it to Facebook and annoy your friends who would say, "Oh, look at her, showing off how far her cat goes in a day, when mine only sits under the car getting oil on his back"

It could show you how many calories your cat has burned and whether it deserves the extra bowl of KiteKat it's telling you it desperately needs, or whether it just wants to be a fat cat.

I think I'm on to a winning idea here.

The only problem is that you would have to get your cat it's own i-phone.  Can you imagine the apps it would download?