I have dogs now, but I grew up with cats. Over the years, my family always had at least two cats at a time and though a few needed to be re-homed when they proved not a good fit for our family (or the other cat), we never had to deal with the fear of one going missing.
But what I've learned in the age of the internet is that missing cats are very common and also very likely to simply be due to the cat being a bit of a dick.
The original post was by a Russian man named Stanislav Zak and explains that after his cat was lost, he thought he'd finally found it. And then the real cat came home.
What's incredible about these particular cats is that their markings give them a very distinct face, and yet somehow there are two of them.
And his fans began sharing their own stories about their cats leaving the house and suddenly having a clone appear.
This one was seen sitting in a window right next to its owner's missing cat sign.
Life would be so much easier if cats came when they called.
Which is true, but these seem like the sort of small differences you would only see with the cats side by side. Like, yes one cat's white chest stretches farther back around the neck and the other's has no break between belly patches, but those are small differences.
The excitement of finding who you think is your cat probably supplants any nagging questions like, "Didn't Fluffy have a bit more white at his chest?"
Hopefully, he's reached out to local shelters to see if someone else is missing their cat, but if it's actually a stray he's now taken in, perhaps it's time to color-code with collars.
