New York family reunited with cat that ran away 11 years ago
![A cat sits in the woods.](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/Hu7gbXjhrwHzxpnBU5jdAX-415-80.jpg)
It took more than a decade, but Maggie Welz knew that her cat Tiger, who slipped out the door of her New York home 11 years ago, would one day reunite with his family.
They were "heartbroken" when Tiger escaped, Welz told ABC New York, and a year later, after moving 10 houses away, she told the new owners to "keep an eye out for him, but he never returned." No one knows what Tiger was up to during his first few years on the streets, but in 2016, he appeared for the first time in Carol O'Connell's yard. O'Connell works for the Dutchess County SPCA, and said it wasn't until this spring that the cat would let her come close.
She wasn't sure if the cat was feral, had been abandoned, or was missing, and when she scanned him for a microchip, she learned that Welz was his owner. The 14-year-old cat was in great shape for having been on his own for 11 years, and after being examined by a vet, Tiger was able to go home. Welz told ABC New York she is "grateful" to O'Connell and her family for their "persistence and their dedication and for making sure that our cat was okay. I have no idea where he was for the years in between, I'm sure he could tell us many tales, but the thing is that he is now home with us and he will be with us for the remainder of his life."
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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