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Facebook reunites lost cat with owners two years after disappearance

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When Shane and Nicole Meide’s cat, Bob, disappeared, they had no idea that their eventual reunion would be made possible by America’s most popular social networking site.

Bob was found in Coon Rapids, Minn., and wound up at the local humane society. He had a microchip, but his owners’ contact information was out of date. Amber Wallin, a humane society employee, was about to put the cat up for adoption -- but she had an idea for a last-ditch effort to find his owners:

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Facebook.

As it turned out, the Meides had joined the site only a week before Wallin’s attempt to contact them. Amy Lieberman at ZooToo has the details:

It turns out, their timing couldn’t have been better -- Wallin found Shane Meide’s private profile, and sent him a message.

‘Four or five hours later I got a response from Shane, saying, ‘Oh my God, you found Bob,’ ‘ Wallin recalled.

The pair exchanged numbers, and now, two years after he disappeared from his family’s East Bethel, Minn., home, the cat, Bob, is back home with his family.

Wallin said it was the first time she has utilized Facebook, or any other online site, to reunite lost pets and their owners.

‘I just thought, ‘You know, it’s a shot in the dark, but why not just give it a go?’ Facebook is such a popular site,’ she said.

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Wallin was careful to make sure she had found Bob’s rightful owners; the Meides had filed a report on their missing pet when he became lost back in 2007, and Wallin used information from the report to identify them.

Wallin cautioned pet owners to ensure their pets’ tags and microchips were updated whenever contact information changed to avoid potentially disastrous situations like Bob’s. (Information on how to update an AVID microchip is available on the company’s website.)

-- Lindsay Barnett

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