We adopted Aurelius and Caius from a registered breeder near us as we really wanted Burmese as we had heard they were very loving.
Aurelius and Cai sometimes play in our fully enclosed garage to give them a change of scenery - they have been doing this once a week for over a year. I came out to discover the garage door was open and Aurelius was gone. Cai was still there. When we looked at the security camera footage - we saw Aurelius jumping on the door handle and he managed to get it open and then disappeared a few minutes later.
My first thoughts were that he would not be far away as he is a fully indoor cat and would be too scared to venture too far. However, once a whole day and night had gone past without us finding him despite long searches - I feared either some had had taken him or we would find him run over a few days later.
Our neighbours were really lovely with several checking their yards for us and promising to let us know if they saw him. Fortunately we ended up finding him ourselvesa few hours after I contacted Lost Pet Finders so we didn’t really end up needing the services.
I had done heavy research and on the advise of a woman who is a pet detective - we stuck to a 200m radius and kept searching our own street again and again. She said that over 90% of indoor only cats she finds were found within 3 houses of their own home and that you just have to be persistent and search the same spots again and again. She said they get very scared and go silent and still - so you have to keep searching again and again until they brave enough to make themselves known.
She was 100% right.
We ended up finding him two days after he went missing. He was right in the middle of a thick piece of shrub - you could not see him at all and I had checked there and walked past him a million times.
We ended up taking our other cat with us in his carrier as a last resort for a final big search and my son heard him meow from the bush - maybe he could smell or hear his brother in the carrier.
He was VERY happy to see us and slept for two days straight.
My advice is search the same close area again and again and again. Choose different times and just keep checking. I searched the spot we found him over 25 times but he was so enmeshed in the thick bush that he was impossible to see - we only found him when he was brave enough to meow. Visually, we never would have found him in there.
