20-year-old cat missing since Hurricane Matthew reunited with NC family years later

Laken Read has befriended many cats, but her first ever was Muffin.

So after her beloved pet ran away from her family’s North Carolina home in 2016, she was devastated. But she never gave up hope.

“I pretty much refused to believe she passed,” the 24-year-old said Monday in a phone interview. “It was really unfortunate timing, too, because Hurricane Matthew had hit after she went missing.”

As the powerful storm moved in, Read said she went out in the rain to call out Muffin’s name. Her family knocked on doors, put up flyers and went back to their old Fuquay-Varina neighborhood to see if the 16-year-old cat had wandered there.

After Hurricane Matthew left behind a path of fallen trees and flooded streets in parts of Wake County, Muffin was nowhere to be found.

“Once the bad weather came, that’s when we really started to worry,” Jerry Read told McClatchy News. “Then we couldn’t find her anywhere. We started worrying even more. We felt like we’d done all we could do, but we knew she was microchipped.”

Microchips implanted in pets store information that can help reunite the animal with their owners. And that’s exactly what happened last week with Muffin.

Finding Muffin

Laken Read was with a friend when she got a call about a surprise.

She told McClatchy News she didn’t know what was going on until her family pulled up to a vet’s office. That’s where she was reunited with the cat that had been by her side since she was 4 years old.

“I’ve met and befriended a lot of cats,” Read said. “But she was my first cat ever, and she just has never been mean to any person.”

During the emotional reunion, Read said she burst into tears. Though Muffin had aged and developed some health problems, she still had her signature greeting.

“She used to greet people by head-butting them, by rubbing up against their head,” Read said. “She’s been doing that pretty much to everybody who’s seen her since we got her back.”

It turns out, Muffin hadn’t gotten too far away.

Read said her pet was living a few miles away in an area the family had checked back in 2016. At the time, Muffin kept trying to run toward that neighborhood.

“I would bring her back in,” Read said. “Then she got out one day, and that’s when she didn’t come back.”

That’s likely because the cat had found a new temporary home in Apex, on the porch of Stephanie Stanton.

Her Apex family fed the animal and called her Jessie. Stanton said her daughter and many others in the neighborhood embraced the cat, who they thought was a stray.

“A part of me feels like she was meant to be there for a little bit for our family,” Stanton told McClatchy News. “We sort of borrowed her for a little bit, but it felt really good for her to be able to go back to her original owner.”

She said potentially expensive veterinary bills kept her from taking Jessie to get checked for a microchip sooner. Stanton took the cat in when she thought she was having seizures, symptoms that turned out to be from a flea infestation.

Domestic cats typically only live up to two decades, according to the humane society.

“The toughest part is knowing this is a 20-year-old cat now, that... we’re going to have to say goodbye again,” Jerry Read said. “But that was at least a little comfort that here at the end of her life she’ll be back with the family that she knew for 16 years.”

His daughter said she hopes all pet owners will consider microchipping and has shared her reunion story with customers at her job, including one who lost a pet.

“They just said that it brought them hope,” she said.