If you have an outdoor cat, you’ll probably be familiar with their roaming habits. However, most cats don’t travel too far – it’s relatively rare for our feline friends to go over half a mile away from home.
But one cat, who lives in California, clearly knows his way around more than most, and was able to travel almost 1,000 miles back home after going missing on vacation.
Rayne Beau visited Yellowstone National Park in June with his parents, Benny and Susanne Anguiano, along with a feline sibling. However, he was startled not long after they arrived and ran off into the trees nearby.
The Anguianos looked for him for four days, trying to entice him back with some of the best cat treats and toys, but then had to return back to their home in Salinas, California. While they were devastated, Susanne never lost hope, saying, via the Associated Press, “We were entering the Nevada desert and all of a sudden I see a double rainbow. And I took a picture of it and I thought, that’s a sign. That’s a sign for our rainbow that he’s going to be okay.”
In August, the family received a message from a microchip company, letting them know that Rayne Beau was at the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) in Roseville, California, nearly 900 miles from Yellowstone and only around 200 miles away from his Salinas home.
A woman, Alexandra Betts, saw the cat on the streets of Roseville and left food and water out for him. Once she trapped him, she took him to the local SPCA branch. And a day after it contacted the Anguianos, they drove to Roseville to bring their cat home.
“I believe truly that he made that trek mostly on his own,” said Susanne. “His paws were really beat up. He lost 40% of his body weight, had really low protein levels because of inadequate nutrition. So he was not cared for.”
She and Benny Anguiano don’t know how Rayne Beau found his way to Roseville but believe he was trying to get home. And now, they’ve fitted their cats with air tags and given Rayne Beau a GPS global tracker to go alongside their microchips.
While the couple’s cats enjoy traveling with their parents and looking out the window of their camper van, they won’t be traveling all together any time soon. Benny said, “It was a very ugly feeling after we lost him. We’ll have to practice camping at home and camp in the driveway to get him used to it.”
Can cats find their way home? Well, Rayne Beau certainly seems to have done a good job of getting close – even when he started a few states away. Meanwhile, here’s what to know about traveling with a cat.
