CatsEye
02/15/10
02:15 PM EST
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Ingrid Kerger holds long lost cat named Tiger. Credit: Boris Minkevich,
Winnipeg Free Press
Fourteen years after her cat, Tiger Lily, disappeared, Ingrid Kerker of
Winnipeg, Canada was stunned to receive a phone call from a veterinary
clinic, asking if she had ever owned an orange tabby. The clinic had found
a feline with an identification code tattooed in its right ear that led to
Kerker's old address, reports the Winnipeg Free Press.
"I was just shocked," Kerker tells Paw Nation. "Tiger Lily disappeared on
October 12, 1996. I remember because I wrote the date down in my Bible."
At the time, Kerker and her two young sons put up posters looking for
their cat, but they never found her. "Over the years, we wondered what
happened to her and she would come up in conversation periodically." Tiger
Lily had once been a stray that Kerker adopted and had spayed and
tattooed. "In Canada, every animal that is spayed or neutered has to be
microchipped or tattooed," Kerker explains. "Back then, they didn't have
microchipping, so I had Tiger Lily tattooed."
After getting the call from the veterinary clinic, Kerker quickly called
her sons, both now in their twenties. "My younger son Rick [now 23]
couldn't wait to go out and get her." Rick took along a photo of himself
at eight years old, sleeping with Tiger Lily.
"She was very friendly right away," Kerker tells Paw Nation about
reuniting with Tiger Lily. "She just cuddled up on my chest and it was
like we hadn't skipped a bit." Except, of course, that Tiger Lily was much
older. "The animal clinic examined her and we think she's actually 19
years old," Kerker says. The family has no idea what Tiger Lily was doing
these past 14 years. All they know is that when the staffer at the animal
clinic rescued her, the cat was thin and smelled of diesel fuel.
Tiger Lily is as affectionate as always and loves to hug cheek to cheek.
It took her about three days to get used to the two other cats in Kerker's
household, though the dog is another story "All three of the cats line up
and eat out of the same bowl," Kerker says. "But Tiger Lily's still a
little uncertain about the dog."
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