Help! I Lost My Cat During The Flood!

[mermaid70]

Last Friday I had to evacuate my house because it was getting flooded. I left the Vieng Ping road area, waded through water waist high with my cat in a bag and a few belongings in another. I managed to make it to Suan Pai Long, in Chang Kien, to a friend's house where I am still staying 'till the situation clears out completely. Unfortunately once I got there my cat escaped and I cannot find it anymore!! It's a fully black, short-haired neutered male, with big green eyes. He's a little bigger than the average Thai cat (I brought it here from Singapore). He's wearing a green collar with a red metal tag, with his name CALIMERO carved on. I am heartbroken and I would really appreciate any help. Also if anyone knows where I can ask, or if there is a way to make a radio announcement in Thai somewhere...Please, please help me find Calimero. He's not used to living in nature and is very shy with strangers. I really don"t know how to proceed..

[Cyrus2Ray]

I really hope that you will find your cat soon !

I am not in Thailand yet, although I have been planning on moving there for a long time now,

so unfortunately I can not help you, but I sincerely wish for you and your cat to be reunited soon.

What I did when I had lost my cat was putting up posters all over the place, anywhere I could, and it worked.

you probably know this already, but creating a standard printer size poster page, in Thai and in English,

then getting lots of copies, putting them up with tape or staples, depending on the surface where you mount the poster,

- get some strong tape and a strong stapler -

put up posters all over the place, anywhere and everywhere you can,

have his photo included in your posters too of course,

and hope that someone will eventually see him and call your number to give you the good news !

I feel your pain and anxiety, as anyone who has a pet can,

prayers for you and your cat ..

PS: mentioning a "Reward" money usually gets more attention,

put up his picture: crop the photo you have on this forum, get rid of the extra space around him, so you can enlarge his actual photo as big as you can,

Cash REWARD , whatever amount Baht !!!! .... on top of the page, to get more attention,

Regarding the phone number: make it the "tear-off" style, I am not sure what it is called, but have you ever seen posters that have their phone number at the bottom of the page, in a row next to each other, about 10 or 12 of them, and the space between them is already cut ?...,( you'd have to cut on the line between them with a pair of scissors before putting them up ) so all one has to do is grab one of them and tear it off, so they can take it with them. so if you do not know how to do it, find someone who is handy with the software, and try to use this style for the phone number if you can. ...people never remember phone numbers, and they never take the time to find a pen and paper to write it down, or enter it into their mobile phones, so if they can just tear off the number off the bottom of the page, they are more likely to actually take the number, and hence increase the effectiveness of your posters.

Edited October 1, 2011 by Cyrus2Ray

[lis41]

I really know very little about it, but when my dog went missing, a Thai friend translated my "Lost" poster into Thai and put it on a local Thai classified page. Apparently it gets a lot of traffic. Ask a Thai friend who may be in the know.

Put up lost posters in English and Thai, add the reward bit. Wouldn't hurt to put something in to Chiang Mai Mail's facebook page, that seems to be the place where people are putting out/getting a lot of updated information concerning the floods.

I wish you and your cat all the luck in being reunited.

[NancyL]

I wish you all the best. Yes, posters are a great idea, as is talking with all the small business owners in the area. People like laundry ladies and food cart operators know what's going on in the neighborhood. They may have seen the cat and just assumed that its owner lets it wander around. Fortunately, it has a tag and collar, so it's obviously someone's pet.

In the U.S., our cat went missing shortly after we moved to a new house. Fortunately, I'd been able to give him a new ID tag with the new address and phone number before he got out of a gate that we thought was "cat-proof". He was missing two weeks and we gave him up for dead. I'd talked to some of the business owners and finally someone involved with a very upscale restaurant close to our home realized that the cat they'd been feeding was indeed lost, and not just visiting. (They'd checked out the address on his I.D. tag) Turns out he was living under the shrubs around the restaurant and begging at their kitchen. The kitchen staff was giving him leftovers from customer plates. They said he was especially fond of baked potatoes with lots of sour cream and butter, lobster and the little pieces of steak fat that people left on their plates. He was returned to us weighing more than when he left home!

[mermaid70]

I have managed to retreive better pictures of Calimero, posting them here just in case. Thank you for all your tips...I'll keep searching!