A Southland woman is overjoyed after a four-year search for her missing cat ended with a trademark high-five from the paw of her “best friend”.<\/p>\n
Winton woman Torria Cummings said she never gave up hope of finding Ceasar after he went missing when she moved to a new house.<\/p>\n
Now after years of searching, tears and false alarms, the pair have been reunited.<\/p>\n
”I still can’t believe he is here – it sounds so cliche, but I just had this feeling he was still alive.”<\/p>\n
It was a social media post from Farming Mums NZ and Furever Homes that led to the reunion.<\/p>\n
The post was from a woman asking for help to check the sex of a ”stray cat”, which she had rescued from another family.<\/p>\n
”I messaged her and said that my cat was missing – it was a long shot as it was so long ago.<\/p>\n
”I sent some photos of Ceaser and then she asked me if there was anything you can distinguish that it’s him – I told him he could high-five.”<\/p>\n
She told the woman if she clicked her fingers, he would jump up and high-five and she replied saying it looked like him.<\/p>\n
Cummings said she could not believe it.<\/p>\n
”I went there, I was trying to keep my expectations down because I’ve gone to so many places to see if it was him – and it wasn’t.<\/p>\n
”As soon as I went down there and he high-fived me – She was just like ‘Oh my God, it’s not normal for a cat to high-five. This is your boy’.”<\/p>\n
Cummings was happy to have Ceaser back and said he was already fitting in with her children.<\/p>\n
”They get jealous sometimes because I just cuddle him all the time, but he’s just a part of the family again.”<\/p>\n
Cummings adopted Ceaser when she was about 19.<\/p>\n
While her family had many cats before, she had just moved into a new flat with her partner and thought it would be a milestone to have their first pet.<\/p>\n
”I’m a cat person. Not like heaps of cats, one is enough kind of girl, but Ceaser was my first cat.<\/p>\n
”He became my best friend and he still is, now that he’s back.”<\/p>\n
Years later, Cummings, who is a farm manager, moved to Wreys Bush.<\/p>\n
In the same week, when she returned home for lunch, she could not find Ceaser.<\/p>\n
”He was gone. So my husband and I went searching for him. We called out his name, went to the neighbours’ properties, put posts on social media . . . But we had no luck.<\/p>\n
”We repeated that so many times – we went looking for him for months, if not years, because I still had hope.”<\/p>\n
Not long after, Cummings moved to another farm – but she never stopped searching for Ceaser.<\/p>\n
During those years, there were a lot of false alarms, and whenever she was around Wreys Bush she called Ceaser’s name, she said.<\/p>\n
Cummings and her husband have had two cats and two children since then, but she always had ”her best friend” on her mind.<\/p>\n
”I kept seeing posts and being like, ‘it could be him. I’ll just go out and check him out’.”<\/p>\n
Furever Homes volunteer Loanna Messman said the story of Ceaser and Cummings was a great example of owners who never gave up.<\/p>\n
”To everyone with a missing pet, don’t give up hope. Cats are incredibly resilient.<\/p>\n
”We’re overjoyed for them.”<\/p>\n
Source: Otago Daily Times & RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Southland woman is overjoyed after a four-year search for her missing cat ended with a trademark high-five from the paw of her “best friend”. Winton woman Torria Cummings said she never gave up hope of finding Ceasar after he went missing when she moved to a new house. Now after years of searching, tears […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":13033,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13032"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13034,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13032\/revisions\/13034"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}