Originally posted by: KarenMarie
I would not worry until the cat has been gone for more than 24 hours. An indoor cat will find a whole new world to explore before they get hungry enough to come home.
Call the local shelters and town animal control this evening to see if anyone found and turned him in.
Yeah, or else listen outside. My one cat, Beverly, got out a few years ago, and didn't come right back. She either got lost or scared in the woods behind the house, and just started howling, which is how we found her and brought her back.
Do you have some kind of bowl or dish that you usually feed the cats with/from that makes a distinctive noise? For instance we have a big plastic cup we use to scoop the cat food up and pour it into their ceramic bowls. If you go outside and shake the food container and/or pour some into a bowl that makes a noise, he might hear it and come a runnnin'!
Definitely a good idea, at least if your cat is one who absolutely loves eating. They know all the sounds associated with food. My cats know that food comes from the refrigerator, and they know that the handle is the key to gaining access. But they just don't have the leverage or strength to get it open - luckily.
cats are good at breaking through screen doors. especially if they have claws.
Scotty (other cat) decided to have an outing like that. Must have been a squirrel or something outside the sliding screen door - he just ran right at it and busted through. Don't know if he planned to do that, or, more likely, he just forgot that the screen was there in the first place.
I know 10 isn't that old for cats, but when pets know they are going to die, they usually try to get away from everyone and die by themselves
It's different for every cat I guess. We adopted/rescued one cat, Blackie, that was kept confined to a small bathroom, and its litterbox was almost never cleaned. Well, we gave her two baths when we got her home, and she didn't complain. She seemed glad if anything to be clean for once. She had a thyroid problem though, which we just couldn't afford to cure. Treatment would have been in the thousands of dollars.
We had her for several months, and she just loved it there. Freedom, cleanliness, attention, and two other cats she could harass.

She wound up dying though of the illness eventually. She just went to her favorite rug in the cellar, where she normally liked to sleep, and that was where she died then.

But at least she was able to die somewhere that she liked, instead of her little prison that she'd lived in for so long.
They just need to keep over-emotional cat owners (I think that's redundant) out of this place. Cat owners understand no logic and react on pure emotion alone. That's a recipe for a basketcase.
I have to deal with the results of people like you at my house, with their disgusting cats coming over and pissing on my cars. I get in my car in the morning and it smells like cat piss.
I already exterminated a few of these pests, but my town is infested with them. They're like roaches, sneaking around and crawling out of the woodwork.
I can guarantee you one thing- if you keep your cat locked in your house *like a responsible pet owner should*, you have nothing to fear. But if you think that you can let your cat outside to "rule the night" and mess with other people's property, don't be surprised when it doesn't come home.
Open Letter to an Asshole:
There's a difference between feral cats, irresponsible pet owners' cats, and responsible pet owners' cats.
Feral cats of course are homeless, and breed freely, and are an unfortunate result of irresponsible pet owners, who get cats, then decide they don't want them, so they dump them somewhere. Or they don't get their pets spayed or neutered, so they go out and get jiggy with anything they can find.
Responsible pet owners, like Lothar1974, might have their cats slip out sometimes. And how he's quite worried about trying to find his pet. That's a responsible pet owner. You can't keep your cat locked in the house 100% of the time, unless you keep the pet confined to a cage, which is just cruel.
Cats see the people going out of the big doors to some bigger place, and they want to see what's going on out there, so they'll try to bolt out the door if they can.
So, there's a difference between a feral cat and someone's beloved pet. Unfortunately, it's not easy to distinguish just by looking.
Concerning the problem of cat pee on your car tires....no easy solution there I think. You've heard of animals marking their territory - well, your tire now smells like cat urine, and may always have a slight odor to it, perceivable only by cats. I don't know, maybe spray it with some kind of hot pepper stuff?
To sum up, ok, maybe you have a serious and genuine feral cat problem where you're at. We tend to think of killing cats as horribly cruel, but that's because cats are common pets. Groundhogs are generally shot indiscriminately - that'd surely change if they were kept as pets. What I'm getting at is, your attitude is appalling. Some people dearly love their animals. True, some cat owners are assholes and let their animals do whatever they want. Try to save the majority of your anger for the humans that are responsible for this. But for those people who have a lot of emotion invested in their pets, their cat might slip out once, and find your urine-scented tire, and do what comes naturally. The owner has no malicious intent, nor does the cat. Only you do, killing out of irrational, all-consuming contempt. No better than an untrained, wild animal.