Random Access

You can imagine how disappointed Sandy Millar was last week when, after eight months of desperately trying to find her beloved cat, she finally hooked up with an animal that looked like hers, but wasn’t.
Standing in an industrial area near Winston Churchill Blvd. and Dundas St. on a frigid day, a heavily-bundled Millar tried to lure the stray with little bits of kibble provided in the bowl that had belonged to her 10-year-old snowshoe Himalayan named Cappuccino (Cappy for short).
“This cat had a beige back and my cat had a white one,” Millar said in her Erin Mills home yesterday. “My cat had big beautiful blue eyes and this one had darker eyes. Cappy’s crowning glory was her big fluffy tail that she arched over her back. This cat had a short tail.”
Bitterly disappointed after all of her seemingly promising detective work had failed again, Millar nonetheless lured the growling cat closer and closer, eventually feeding it with her bare hand and then grabbing it by the nape of the neck. “It isn’t my cat,” she called out to the workers at Mirror Interiors across the road on Bristol Circle who were watching the procedure and had been feeding the cat. It apparently lived in open fields nearby that are pock-marked with a labyrinth of old underground coyote runs.
Hoping to find the owner, Millar took the animal to her vet, explaining that even though it wasn’t her Cappy, she hoped that it would have an identifying microchip under its skin.
A few minutes later, a reproachful attendant came out from the examining room and asked, “Are you Sandra Millar?” When she confirmed she was, she was told, “Then, that’s your cat.”
Now, Millar has a new chapter, with a happy ending, to write for her instructional book called 101 Ways To Catch a Lost Cat (which should be subtitled, How To Avoid All The Mistakes I Made) which will be published by Detselig Enterprises of Calgary in about a year.
One of the things the book will explain is that the colour of a cat’s fur, and even the colour of its eyes, can change when it has been in the wild and is in poor health.
Millar is a 64-year-old who taught art full-time in Mississauga schools for many years, now supply-teaches for the public board, and does freelance writing on the arts for The Mississauga News.
When her cat skipped town a few days after she moved into her new home last summer (a common occurrence after a move), she visited the book store to try to find a how-to-find-your-cat book. When she couldn’t, she decided to write one herself.
She made a lot of classic mistakes: failing to notifying animal control right away, using black and white flyers instead of colour and not taking advantage of the best network of animal watchers in any town, the schoolchildren.
A chance discussion with a woman in the office at Garthwood Public School last week set Millar on the reunification path with Cappy, who is now starting to recover from her outdoor ordeal.
What amazed Millar most about the entire experience, which saw her resort to an animal psychic in desperation at one point, was the genuine, heartfelt interest that total strangers took in her loss.
“I thought that maybe 20 per cent of people would care,” she says. “I never imagined that 100 per cent would care.”
She received innumerable phone calls as a result of the flyers she plastered around the neighbourhood. Seventy-year-old Vittorio paid for colour photo-copying because he knew the the black and white was not effective enough. Paulette at Mirror Interiors not only fed Cappy but pointed out her regular haunts that led to her capture.
“I was just overwhelmed by how much people really cared,” says Millar.
It not only takes a village to raise a child, but it apparently takes a whole compassionate city to find a lost cat.