Shelter reunites Katrina cat with family
Published: November 6, 2005
After sitting out many a hurricane in her family’s Louisiana home, Nita Tyson decided to evacuate before Hurricane Katrina blew in.
She, her husband, Gerald, and their two daughters began rounding up their Rottweiler, two kittens and a cat named Garfield. But Garfield darted out the window and streaked away. “We chased him as far as we could, but we could only chase so far,” Mrs. Tyson said.
Eventually, they arrived in Front Royal, Va., and began making plans to move permanently to West Virginia. But Mrs. Tyson never forgot about the cat that got away.
Her online reminiscences paid off two weeks ago when she was reunited with Garfield at Rude Ranch Animal Rescue Center in Harwood, courtesy of a Web site, Best Friends Animal Sanctuary and Bob and Katherine Rude.
About three weeks ago in Virginia, Mrs. Tyson mentioned how much she missed Garfield in an online chat forum, and a friend told her he had found his dog in San Antonio through www.petfinder.com.
She managed to narrow it down to a handful of male orange tabby cats at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Tylertown, Miss., and convinced Mr. Tyson to stop there en route back to Louisiana to pack up what remained of their house. So far, Best Friends has documented 112 reunions, a spokesman there said.
But Mr. Tyson wasn’t as lucky. He discovered that the cats from the neighborhood had been picked up by Bob Rude to be taken to the rescue center. Mrs. Tyson and her 9-year-old, Angelique Starr, drove out to Harwood to look at the orange tabby cats.
“The first cat, it wasn’t it, and I thought I was going to cry,” Mrs. Rude said. That cat turned out to be a stray from her neighborhood named Itsy-Bitsy, Mrs. Tyson said.
Then, Mrs. Rude introduced them to another orange tabby, hard to recognize because of his massive weight loss, worn paw pads and series of dog bites. Mrs. Tyson said Garfield frequently curled up in naps with the Rottweiler, Nazareth, which is why she believes he had no fear of dogs.
Although Garfield shied away from the Rudes, when he saw his human owners, he began a paw motion that cats do when content.
“This one, he was standoffish with us, but with them he immediately began kneading,” Mrs. Rude said. There are now 21 cats and a dog from Tylertown recovering at Rude Ranch, and they are expected to be available for adoption in the middle of next month.
“He was looking at me like, ‘Oh, it’s my human,’ alternating with ‘You little … why did you leave me?’ ” Mrs. Tyson said, sniffling. “I really felt guilty.”
Garfield is making a slow recovery, she said. Still too traumatized to get out of his carrier, he’s slept inside there, and is steadily regaining weight.
Mrs. Tyson said she’s forever indebted to the animal volunteers who were rescuing, rejuvenating and reuniting the animals with their owners.
“I thought we’d never see him again,” she said. “I don’t think people have any idea of the effort the people at the shelters are putting in.”
She said when her husband returned to Virginia, he had little with him - practically nothing in their St. Bernard Parish house was salvageable.
“A lot of people only escaped with their kids and their pets, and some didn’t even get to do that,” she said. “That’s why that cat meant so much to us.”
If there was any doubt of the cat’s identity, it was erased when the other animals sniffed Garfield’s cage.
“They were like, ‘Oh, it’s you,” Mrs. Tyson said. “If it had been a stray, they would have gone crazy.”
That night, she said, Nazareth slept by the cat carrier.
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