Where identichipping a cat was possibly the wrong thing

This did not happen to me today. One of the other vets I work with came into my consulting room looking very stressed. A 94 year old man had brought in a cat for vaccinating. He explained how much he loved the cat. He had called him Harvey and Harvey had ‘chosen him’  he said and had appeared in his garden 5 months ago.

As we always have to scan any stray cat to see if it has been chipped or not, my colleague did the right thing and scanned Harvey, only to find a microchip (to her horror).  After a quick phone call to the national idchip company, she found out that Harvey is actually Tom and has been missing from a house not that far away from the elderly man, for the last year!

She felt awful telling the 94 year old man. He was there with his daughter and she gently explained to him that there were plenty of cats around in the rehoming centres and they would look for another cat that afternoon.

He reacted like the man in Little Britain by saying ‘ No, I want that one. Now I have nothing to live for!’ What a dilemma. I will find out tomorrow what happened to the cat and poor old man.

This entry was posted on 26/09/2008 at 03:13 pm and is filed under A veterinary day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.