The tale of the travelling cat gets a happy ending in Surrey

SURREY (NEWS 1130) – How a cat from Switzerland got to Surrey is anyone’s guess, but her owners are sure glad they’ll soon have her back. Staff at the Surrey Animal Resource Centre will be celebrating the reunion of Pharfalla and her guardians two years after she disappeared.

Pharfalla was already a well-traveled kitty before her longest journey of all. The eight-year-old tortie was born in Germany and lived in Switzerland most of her life. Her owners uprooted and moved from Switzerland to McLeese Lake near Williams Lake in 2014. Pharfalla went missing not long after that. Her owners assumed a predator had gotten to her. That’s not uncommon in a wild area like McLeese Lake.

Flash forward to last week when Pharfalla turned up at a Surrey doorstep. The home owner called the Surrey Animal Resource Centre. Staff picked her up and noticed she was in fairly good condition for a street cat and she has an identification microchip in her ear.

Operations Manager for Bylaws and Licensing Kim Marosevich says the information on the chip confused them at first. “The microchip number convention is not recognizable to the staff. In North America, there are a few companies that we routinely see their microchips and they each have their own individual system of numbering. The staff are a little bit stumped by this, so they do some research and they discover the microchip numbers are associated with a company in Switzerland.”

Marosevich adds the Swiss company was able to provide them with up to date contact information on Pharfalla’s guardians. They are still living in McLeese Lake and Marosevich says they had a hard time believing this could actually be their cat. “I think they’re just boggled. How she could’ve gotten from McLeese Lake two years ago to Surrey. How she ended up turning up now, why at this time? Her owner was the first one to use the Christmas miracle phrase. For them it is a Christmas miracle.”

There’s no way to know what happened to Pharfalla in those two years in between or how she made the 560 kilometre journey. Marosevich guesses based on Pharfalla’s good condition that there is some human involvement, perhaps someone found her near McLeese Lake and moved with her to the Lower Mainland where she ran away again.

Marosevich believes this is a very unique story. She says not everyone keeps the information associated with the microchip up to date. Pharfalla’s guardians are making the drive to Surrey to collect her Friday.

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