CAPE TOWN - In a miraculous twist of fate, a black Burmese cat named Kooks who ended up travelling about 700km in a car from Cape Town to St Francis Bay, was reunited with her owner through the tracking of a Samsung bluetooth device and a community effort.
Kooks’ owner Celeste Perry from Rondebosh said she noticed her five-year-old cat went missing last Saturday while she and her husband had been at work.
“We had been working quite late and only realised on the Sunday that she had not been around for awhile. Her tag kept showing different locations around Rondebosch near to where we live and everywhere we checked we couldn’t trace her.
“I was starting to get worried that she had tried to cross that road and she’s not used to wandering, she’s a homebody cat,” she said.
On Monday morning Perry got an alert via the app on her phone, that the tag was moving, first to Athlone, then Khayelitsha, then to Macassar, Strand through Gordon’s Bay.
“I thought maybe her tag had fallen off. I told my husband let’s wait and see. All day on Monday, I tracked this collar and it just didn’t stop moving.”
The tracker picked up stops from Riversonderend, to Mossel Bay, Knysna and finally St Francis Bay.
Perry then posted on social media to alert her local community that someone who had travelled from Rondebosch to St Francis Bay, could have her cat with them.
Various residents offered to help look for the cat.
“I got a call from a lady who said she lived just around the corner from me and had left at 7am in the morning. We backtracked all the stops I had been tracking and she said my cat must have been in her car.”
The woman, Rose Prew, then took the car to have it jacked up in Humansdorp to check where the cat could have hidden.
“By the right front wheel there’s a really nice space, she would have been safe there. We travelled for 700km or much longer because we had stopped five times. I still don’t know how she didn’t get out but I’m glad. We searched for five days and I am mad about cats, it was very stressful and I was very scared something could have happened to her,” said Prew.
On Friday, Perry took a plane to Chief Dawid Stuurman International Airport then hired a car to St Francis Bay determined to find Kooks.
As she was looking near where the device had last pinged when she spotted Kooks, a jingle activated by the app went off giving the cat a fright, resulting in her running off.
Perry saw her cat had run into one of the resident’s gardens.
“I stuck my hand under this wooden platform, she hid herself under, picked her up and put her in my jacket, zipped her up, she was nice and snug.”
They spent one night in St Francis Bay and headed back to Cape Town, with Kooks still in perfect health.
Cape Times