Lost by Lufthansa at Dulles, Milo Is Eventually Located but He Would Appear to Owe His Deliverance More to Pure Luck Rather Than to Human Ingenuity

Milo Was Lost at by Baggage Handlers at Dulles

"My main takeaway from the experience is that persistence is key, and that it's important to start building a support network right away when you lose a pet, especially when the animal in question is lost at an airport or other facility with restricted access."
-- Molly McFadden

How on earth does an individual ever locate a lost cat? That question has befuddled owners ever since the species was first domesticated some ten-thousand years ago.

Au premier coup d'oeil, the much-celebrated successful reunification in early December of a three-year-old, gray and white German male named Milo with his guardian would appear to have provided a valuable primer on that perplexing subject. Upon closer scrutiny, however, that was hardly the case.

Milo's woes began on October 3rd when his owner, United States Army Captain Molly McFadden, shoved him into a plastic crate and took him to Flughafen München in Freising, twenty-eight kilometers northeast of Bayern's Hauptstadt, for a long flight aboard Lufthansa to Dulles International Airport in the Virginia city of the same name, forty-two kilometers west of Washington. Having just completed a four-year tour of duty at, presumably, United States Air Base Bayern in Grafenwöhr in Oberpfälzer, Neustadt an der Waldnaab, two-hundred-thirty-five kilometers north of München and near the border with the Czech Republic, McFadden was headed home to Arlington, eight kilometers south of the nation's capital.

As far as it is known, the flight was a smooth one without any problems. Shortly after touchdown at a little past 7 p.m., Milo's cage was offloaded first to the tarmac and then to the baggage claims area at the International Arrivals Building. At some point during that short journey Milo escaped and he was last seen near gate B45 at around 7:30 p.m.

"He obviously didn't break it or push it out himself, and he's a cat, so he's not going to yank it in," McFadden later theorized to WUSA-TV of Washington on December 6th. (See "A Christmas Miracle: Milo, the Missing Cat, Has Been Found.") "So, even now, I don't really know what happened to it."

More than likely the steel grill popped loose when one of the baggage handlers irresponsibly flung it down on the tarmac as if it were nothing more than a sack of potatoes. Alternatively, a handler in München could have damaged it while loading it into the cargo hold. A third possibility is that it could have been damaged if the airliner had encountered any significant amount of turbulence while en route to Dulles.

Above all, no responsible owner should ever transport a cat anywhere in a plastic carrier unless it has been heavily reinforced on all sides with duct tape and on top of that fortified with either strong twine or wire to boot. Special care must also be taken in order to duct-tape the grill into place without suffocating the cat to death in the process.

Those precautions are only common sense considering that whenever a cat, even a very small one, becomes frightened it is more than capable of breaking out of a plastic crate by throwing its weight against its flimsy walls and metal grate. Secondly, some cats are real-life Houdinis who seemingly can get out of just about any kind of contraption. Once that occurs its life immediately becomes imperiled and its owner is then saddled with the herculean task of locating and retrieving it.

For example on January 22, 2008, Bronx librarian Ashley Phillips was waiting on the platform at Fifty-Ninth Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan for the number six train to take her home when her seven-month-old black kitten Georgia bolted from her carrier and disappeared into the underground. The Fates were on her side, however, in that she later was found alive on February 16th.

Even so, the ordeal cost her a broken rear leg, a scratch on her nose, and sans doute scared the living daylights out of her. (See Cat Defender post of March 7, 2008 entitled "Georgia Is Found Safe and Sound after Spending a Harrowing Twenty-Five Days Lost in the Bowels of the New York City Subway System.")

Milo also has a brother, a white-colored tom named Beau, who presumably also was on the same flight. Strangely enough, no mention whatsoever has been made in either press reports or on social media as to how that he weathered the long trip and that in turn has fueled speculation that he may have been flying in the cabin with McFadden.

According to an unidentified spokeswoman for Lufthansa, the airline allows up to two cats per passenger to fly in its cabins at an additional cost of US$115 per cat each way. McFadden accordingly does not have a valid excuse for relegating Milo to the cargo hold.

In addition to her unforgivable faux pas of entrusting Milo's life to the airline's slipshod baggage handlers, he easily could have frozen to death. (See Cat Defender post of April 7, 2009 entitled "A Pregnant Minskin Arrives in Oregon Frozen as Solid as a Block of Ice Following a Fatal Cross-Country Flight in the Cargo Hold of an Airliner.")

Sometimes it is unavoidable, but any owner who allows a cat either out of sight or to escape from her immediate control is playing Russian roulette with its life. (See Cat Defender post of January 29, 2020 entitled "Brazenly Abducted from His Home in Broad Daylight by an Auto Parts Delivery Man and Then Allegedly Dumped, Dot Is Nowhere to Be Found Almost Four Months after the Fact.")

Sam Connelly with Brando and Salsa of Pure Gold Pet Trackers

If an individual should still feel compelled in the face of all logic to transport a cat in the cargo hold of an airliner it would be far preferable for that person to take a flight that arrives at its destination not much later than noon. If therefore disaster should strike, it is much easier to locate an errant cat in the daylight rather than after dark.

Unfortunately, by the time that McFadden belatedly realized that Milo was missing it was way too late for her to correct her past mistakes. Milo was gone and as she wandered around that depressing airport half out of her mind with worry on that October evening she had little hope that she would ever see him again.

"I got Milo while living in Germany over the last four years," she explained October 7th on a Facebook page entitled Milo Is Missing. "During that time, I didn't have my family with me, but I had Milo and his brother Beau."

She went on to pen what at the time sounded very much like Milo's eulogy. "They've been with me through thick and thin, and I absolutely love them, and Lufthansa losing Milo was a nightmare I never even considered," she admitted. "Milo is a little cat, and it's a big world out there, especially since he spent most of his life in a small two-bedroom."

Not only is the world itself a big place but Dulles alone covers thirteen-thousand acres in Loudoun and Fairfax counties. It additionally is an unbelievably busy airport that on a daily basis ferries some sixty-five-thousand passengers to one-hundred-twenty-five destinations around the globe.

Most importantly of all, it is an exceedingly dangerous, frightening, and noisy place. Not only are there people, planes, and motor vehicles everywhere, but predatory dogs and wildlife as well.

Without so much as a scintilla of experience in the outside world, Milo surely must have been frightened to death. His principal concern would have been the avoidance of both human and animal predators. On top of that colossal task, he also had to secure shelter from the elements as well as to procure food and water.

Although he sported tattoos on both of his ears, he was neither collared and tagged nor microchipped. Shelters and veterinary offices usually can be counted on to look for and to recognize tattoos but that is not necessarily always the case with members of the public.

Moreover, collars and tags usually can be spotted at a distance and that might have expedited his rescue if he had been equipped with them. Tattoos, on the other hand, are difficult to detect, let alone to decipher, at any measurable distance.

The only known device that possibly would have facilitated his immediate recovery would have been a radio collar and in that light it might very well be worthwhile for owners traveling with cats to outfit them with these devices as a precautionary measure. Even so, they do not contribute a solitary thing toward safeguarding a cat's fragile life, especially one that is on his own in a strange and dangerous environment.

"I didn't have the resources and community to deal with it in the ways I would have liked had he gone missing in my own neighborhood," McFadden later acknowledged to The Washington Post on December 11th. (See "Milo the Cat Went Missing at the Airport in October. Two Months Later, He's Been Reunited with His Owner.")

To her credit, she refused to allow either that or the apparent hopelessness of the situation to deter her. All too often, travelers throw in the towel on cats that go AWOL while in transit. (See Cat Defender post of September 23, 2016 entitled "Cruelly and Irresponsibly Abandoned at a Michigan Rest Stop, Milkie Is Saved by Staffers Who Did What His Derelict Owner Was Unwilling to Do.")

Despite the odds being heavily weighted against her, it did not take McFadden long in order to organize a search. "Despite best efforts, including extensive searching in the area, flyers, tracking dogs and humane traps, Milo has yet to be located, and he has been missing for five days," she wrote October 7th in the same Facebook article cited supra.

Specifically, the dogs and humane traps were supplied by Pure Gold Pet Trackers (PGPT) of Berryville, sixty-nine kilometers northwest of Dulles, which also posted some of the flyers. The firm's services did not come cheaply, however.

Milo Back Home after Having Been Rescued

For instance, it charges US$100 per hour for the services of its two Golden Retrievers, Salsa and Brando. The posting of the "Lost Cat" flyers set McFadden back US$50 an hour and the rental of a trail camera cost her another US$20 per week.

Pure Gold additionally charges US$20 per week for the rental of each humane trap deployed plus another US$20 per hour for the monitoring of them. As if all of that were not daunting enough for most people's pocketbooks, PGPT tacks on a travel fee of US$2 per mile roundtrip.

Coupled with McFadden's substantial presence on social media the search for Milo initially appeared to have gotten off on the right foot, but it did not take long for it to devolve into an expensive and time-consuming wild goose chase. Most obviously, although cats are known to be territorial the search area was almost immediately concentrated, not on airport grounds, but rather in communities located far from the beaten path.

For instance, in a second Facebook posting dated October 7th McFadden issued a plea for volunteers to post flyers in South Riding, nineteen kilometers southwest of Dulles, Stone Ridge, twenty kilometers west of Dulles, Arcola, fifteen kilometers west of Dulles, Brambleton, seventeen kilometers west of Dulles, and Sterling, twelve kilometers north of Dulles. In an October 10th posting she extended that appeal to Chantilly, thirteen kilometers south of Dulles.

In that same posting she also claims that Milo had been spotted at a Sheetz gas station and convenience store located at 42855 Yardley Ridge Drive in Sterling and that Samantha Connelly of PGPT had picked up and followed his scent to a backyard where a humane trap and a trail camera had been set up. Nothing came of that sighting but later that same day McFadden wrote on Facebook that Milo had been sighted entering a storm drain at Town Hall in South Riding. Quite obviously, he could not possibly have been at both locations the same day.

By October 12th McFadden and her team had moved on to Arcola without success. Two days later on October 14th she reached out to the Humane Society of Loudoun County (HSLC) in Leesburg, twenty-eight kilometers north of Dulles, the Loudoun County Community Cat Coalition, also headquartered in Leesburg, and the Middleburg Humane Society in Marshall, fifty-eight kilometers southwest of Dulles.

"Many of us are aware of Milo's plight," Sharon Nylec of HSLC responded October 14th on Milo Is Missing. "Actually we are hoping he shows up at one of our colonies that we've TNR'd." On October 17th, McFadden claimed that Milo had been spotted at 3 a.m., October 13th on a trail camera at another Sheetz, only this time it was at a store in Arcola.

Despite all the apparently erroneous sightings, McFadden still expressed confidence in Connelly and Bonnie Westbrook of PGPT by declaring on October 18th that they were "the best bet we have of finding Milo." On that same occasion she nixed the idea of organizing a search party.

By October 24th the narrative had changed once again with McFadden now claiming that Milo was believed to be living with a TNR colony located across the street from a Sheetz and a CubeSmart Self Storage facility on Yardley Ridge Road in Sterling. That also turned out to have been another false lead but McFadden did not disclose that until a November 8th post on Facebook.

A few days before that on November 4th she did however receive her first real break in the long and frustrating search for her beloved Milo. That occurred when a quartet of employees from the USDA's Wildlife Services spotted him in a patch of woods about eight-hundred meters from a runway at Dulles.

The identification was made thanks to a thermal imaging camera. According to The Washington Post, personnel at Wildlife Services had been called in to look for Milo hours after he had gone missing and they had been making daily searches of the airport ever since then.

Oddly enough, they reportedly had not seen either hide or hair of him before November 4th. That in turn buggers the question of just how seriously they had been looking for him. More than likely they had not been looking for him at all and the sighting was purely accidental.

A mitigating factor could have been that thermal imaging is far from being foolproof. For example, those monsters who track down and assassinate Bengal tigers in India have reported that thermal imaging cameras, usually mounted on drones, are unable to see through dense brush.

Secondly, rocks and other hard surfaces that retain heat, perhaps even including airport runways, make it difficult for them to distinguish between warm-bodied animals and warm inanimate objects. (See Vanity Fair, May 2019, "Shooting a Tiger").

Milo and His Brother Beau

With that being the case, it would appear that thermal imaging cameras would be of limited utility when it comes to locating either dead cats or those that have been dragged underground by coyotes, raccoons, skunks, and other prolific feline predators. They likewise would not be of much help in locating cats and kittens that have been abducted by eagles, owls, and hawks and subsequently spirited off to remote locations.

For the uninitiated, Wildlife Services is the nation's number one wildlife extermination agency and each year it shoots, gases, poisons, traps, drowns, asphyxiates, starves, and blows up with spring-loaded cyanide land mines between two and four million wild animals at the behest of farmers, ranchers, municipalities, golf courses, and others. (See Cat Defender post of September 14, 2005 entitled "The USDA's Wildlife Services Exterminates Millions of Animals Each Year at the Behest of Capitalists" and Washington Post articles dated December 15, 2013 and April 24, 2014 and entitled, respectively, "Petition Targets 'Rogue' Killings by Wildlife Services" and "USDA's Wildlife Services Killed Four Million Animals in 2013; Seen as an Overstep by Some.")

At Dulles and approximately eight-hundred additional airports around the country Wildlife Services' principal activity is slaughtering Canada geese, ducks, and other avian species. (See The Star-Ledger of Newark, March 23, 2014, "Port Authority Animal Killings in New Jersey Have Little Effect on Bird Strikes, Data Reveals (sic).")

After having been notified by Wildlife Services on November 4th, McFadden rushed to Dulles where she came within thirty feet of Milo before he slunk off into the woods. Once she had gotten over the heartbreak of being so close yet so far away from success, she set up motion detection cameras at the airport and baited a humane trap with not only food but bed sheets containing her scent.

Her next article on Milo Is Missing did not come until November 20th and it was a dispirited one at that. "Unfortunately, since the last time the USDA spotted him, we've had so sightings of Milo, in person or on camera," she wrote.

By the time that December 4th had rolled around there still had not been any new sightings of Milo. To make matters worse, by that juncture McFadden had reverted to her willy-nilly ways.

"The last sighting was on Dulles' grounds, but it's possible he could've left airport grounds and wandered into the surrounding area," she wrote on Facebook. "Given that it's getting colder, I'm really hoping we can pick up any sightings of Milo."

With cats almost anything is possible but given that all airports are surrounded by fences and clogged with people and vehicles it hardly would seem likely that a shy and unworldly male like Milo would have been doing too much moving around. It is equally difficult to believe that Wildlife Services was unable to locate him following the November 4th sighting.

Just as it is said to be the darkest before the dawn, Milo finally was sighted in a culvert underneath an intersection at Dulles on December 5th by an employee of Wildlife Services. That individual baited a trap with fish and Milo was collared the following morning.

In spite of all the depravations that he had experienced, officials at Dulles still forced him to go through Customs before he at long last was returned to McFadden later that same day. "I have been waiting so long to make this post and couldn't be more excited about it," she wrote December 6th on Facebook. "Guess who's home for the holidays!!!"

"It's like Christmas came early," she added to WUSA-TV in the article cited supra.

No sooner than he had been rescued, Milo was shuttled off to an unidentified surgery to be poked and probed and after all was said and done he was pronounced to be in good shape despite having been forced to sleep rough for two months. "We're waiting on blood work and he's been pretty tired but otherwise great," McFadden announced December 8th on Facebook. "I'm so excited to have him back."

No one either knows or is willing to speculate as to how that he was able to have persevered for so long. His resilience and resourcefulness even surprised his owner. "I'm proud of him," she declared to WUSA-TV. "I didn't think he had it in him."

Unless someone at the airport was feeding him, he in all probability was forced to scrimp by on food that he scavenged from Dumpsters and whatever small rodents that he was able to capture. A fecal analysis would have provided some clues in answering that conundrum but apparently one was not conducted. It has not even been even disclosed how much weight that he had lost or the condition of his fur, claws, and paws.

Milo Was Exhausted Following His Misadventures

"Anytime we can catch an animal and return it to their (sic) owner, it's an awesome feeling," Ryan Stewart, a wildlife biologist at Dulles, gushed to The Washington Post. "I spoke with the owner several times during Milo's Dulles excursion and became personally invested in seeing his capture through. It's an awesome feeling to know he was safely returned in time for the holidays."

Yet, there is absolutely nothing in either press reports or on Facebook that would tend to indicate that airport personnel lifted so much as a finger in order to find Milo. Of course, it is possible that The Washington Post got it wrong and that Stewart actually works for Wildlife Services as opposed to Dulles.

"We are very happy that Milo was returned to his owner," was all that Christina Semmel of Lufthansa had to say on the matter to The Washington Post. Like the airport itself, the airline does not appear to have contributed a solitary thing toward Milo's successful reunion with McFadden.

That in turn segues into the question of who paid PGPT's sky-high bill and on that topic there cannot be any argument that the responsibility for settling it falls squarely upon the shoulders of Lufthansa. After all, it was the one who lost him.

As for the ultra-secretive Wildlife Services, it has had the bon sens to keep it malignant trap shut. Ironically, Milo could very well be the first and only feline that the agency ever has saved in its long existence considering that it systematically exterminating thousands of them each year.

For example, in addition to the three-hundred-thirty-four cougars and nine-hundred-ninety-seven bobcats that the agency's cold-blooded murderers extirpated in 2016 they also slaughtered five-hundred-fifty-four domestic cats, trapped and allegedly freed five-hundred-thirty-seven more, and dispersed (whatever that means in practice?) four-hundred-sixty-seven others. (See "USDA-Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, Program Data Report G-2016, Animals Dispersed, Killed or Euthanized, Removed or Destroyed, Freed." A link to that report can be found at the Center for Biological Diversity of Tucson's press release of March 4, 2017 entitled "2.67 Million Animals Killed by Wildlife Destruction Program in 2016.")

To put the matter succinctly, whenever there are cats, both big ones and small ones as well, to be killed and regardless of whether the venue is federal, state, or private property Wildlife Services is always called upon to do the job. For example, at the urging of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, it orchestrated the massive slaughter of up to two-hundred cats on San Nicolas. (See Cat Defender posts of June 27, 2008, July 10, 2008, April 20, 2009, November 20, 2009, and February 20, 2012 entitled, respectively, "The United States Fish and Wildlife Service and the Navy Hatch a Diabolical Plan to Gun Down Two-Hundred Cats on San Nicolas Island," "The Ventura Star Races to the Defense of the Cat-Killers on San Nicolas Island," "The Quislings at the Humane Society of the United States Sell Out San Nicolas's Cats to the Assassins at the Diabolical United States Fish and Wildlife Service," "Memo to the Humane Society of the United States: Tell the World Exactly How Many Cats You and Your Honeys at the United States Fish and Wildlife Service Have Murdered on San Nicolas Island," and "The United States Fish and Wildlife Service and the Humane Society of the United States Hoist a Glass in Celebration of Their Extermination of the Cats on San Nicolas Island.")

Plus, the agency to this very day is still busily stealing and eradicating cats in the Florida Keys. (See Cat Defender posts of May 24, 2007 and June 23, 2011 entitled, respectively, "The United States Fish and Wildlife Service and the USDA's Wildlife Services Commence Trapping and Killing Cats on Florida's Big Pine Key" and "Wallowing in Welfare Dollars, Lies, and Prejudices, the Bloodthirsty United States Fish and Wildlife Service Is Again Killing Cats in the Florida Keys.")

One of the main reasons that the feds are able to get away with murdering so many cats is that they enjoy the complicity of the rotten-to-the-core capitalistic media. For instance, in an April 28, 2012 article for The Sacramento Bee, dishonest, cat-hating journalist Tom Knudson cried a proverbial river for the handful of dogs that Wildlife Services extirpates each year while simultaneously failing to even mention that the agency kills far more cats. (See "The Killing Agency: Wildlife Services' Brutal Methods Leave a Trail of Animal Death.")

For her part, McFadden has given a lion's share of the credit for locating Milo to PGPT. "A special thanks also to Sam Connelly from Pure Gold Pet Trackers and Bonnie Westbrook (also known as Team Milo) for helping me stay hopeful and for putting so much work into tracking him down," she wrote December 6th on Facebook.

Au contraire, in hindsight it does not appear that PGPT contributed a bloody thing toward the retrieval of Milo. In fact, it wasted two months of McFadden's time and had her galivanting all over northern Virginia when Milo, most likely, had never so much as left the grounds of Dulles.

"My main takeaway from the experience is that persistence is key, and that it's important to start building a support network right away when you lose a pet, especially when the animal in question is lost at an airport or other facility with restricted access," she pontificated to The Washington Post on December 11th.

Even those assertions are dubious. First of all, an aggrieved owner can search high and low for an errant cat until Hell freezes over but if she is looking in all the wrong places she is not going to be successful.

Secondly, McFadden has not disclosed what level of access that she was afforded by Dulles to its facilities and grounds. The mere fact that she spent the majority of her time chasing down erroneous leads outside its perimeter is, arguably, one indication that the airport was not nearly as forthcoming as Stewart has claimed.

Molly McFadden Graduating from the ROTC Program at Harvard in 2015

Rather, McFadden owes whatever access and assistance that she received to privilege. C'est-à-dire, she should be crediting Milo's safe return to her status as a captain in the United States Army. Why, it is nothing short of laughable for anyone to maintain that the inveterate cat-killers at Wildlife Services would ever have helped an ordinary citizen search for a beloved cat that had gone missing.

So to sum up, there is only one sure-fire method of locating a lost cat and that is not lose it in the first place. "It's wonderful when you read about these reunions but unfortunately for ninety per cent of lost cats, there is no returning home," Lorie Chortyk of the British Columbia SPCA averred to The Province of Vancouver on January 2, 2011. (See "Cats Rarely Come Back.") "When you hear in the media about cats returning home after several months or years, it's usually because a Good Samaritan or an animal shelter traced a tattoo or a microchip back to the original guardians."

More pertinently, cats and airlines are a bad mix all the way around and that problem is compounded by the total unwillingness of carriers, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Department of Transportation of come clean as to the number of them and other animals that are lost, injured and killed each year while in transit. (See "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 2, 2008, "Airline Loophole: Many Animals' Deaths Not Tallied.")

For example, Section 710 of the Wendell H. Ford Aviation Investment and Reform Act for the Twenty-First Century, Public Law 106-81 of 2000 narrowly defines an animal as "any warm or cold-blooded animal which, at the time of transportation, is being kept as a pet in a family household in the United States." That definition excludes all livestock, laboratory animals, those that belong to zoos, and those that come from breeders and pet shops."

Even those that somehow manage to survive grueling trips in cargo holds often suffer broken claws and chipped teeth brought on by the stress. Some of them that have been sedated prior to takeoff never  wake up again.

"These are animals that are struggling to breathe, their hearts are racing, and they're in panic, suffering extreme stress and anxiety," Lila Miller, a veterinarian with the American SPCA in Manhattan, told the New York Post on March 21, 1999. (See "It's a Doggone Shame! They're Drugged, Crushed, Lost and Rerouted.")

The conclusion to be drawn from all of that is inescapable. "The skies are not friendly to pets. Most airplane cargo holds are unsafe for animals," Valery Stanley of the Animal Legal Defense Fund of Cotati, California, wrote in an undated article that was posted some years ago on the web site of Michigan State University in East Lansing. (See "Emergency Travel Alert: Don't Transport Pets by Air.") "Until conditions improve, pet owners should never put their treasured companions aboard a plane. Doing so could seal their doom."

Caring for a cat changes everything. Many individuals desire the numerous benefits that one so freely bestows but yet they are totally unwilling to give up their decadent and selfish  bourgeois lifestyles and that is a recipe for disaster. (See Cat Defender post of July 1, 2010 entitled "Bigga Is Reunited with His Owner after an Eight Year Absence but Life on the Street Has Left Him in Poor Health and Put Her in a Quandary.")

"If it happens to someone else's pet in the future, especially someone returning home, I hope I can be as much help to them as everyone was to me," McFadden, flush with relief for having Milo back at home, graciously pledged to The Washington Post.

Only time and circumstances will tell if she is sincere but that would seem to be highly unlikely. First of all, reciprocity, like a willingness to share the wealth and to be cooperative, never has been the strong suit of Americans.

Secondly, it boggles the mind that any true lover of the species would ever want anything whatsoever to do with the Yankee Imperialist War Machine. For example, the United States military exterminates tens of thousands of cats at home and abroad each year. (See Cat Defender posts of January 19, 2006, November 14, 2006, June 16, 2008, July 16, 2009, and April 17, 2010 entitled, respectively, "Public Outcry Forces the Army Navy Club to Scrap Its Plans to Evict and Exterminate Its Long-Term Resident Felines," "The United States Military Is Killing Cats and Dogs by the Tens of Thousands as Imperialistic America Attempts to Conquer the World," "Targeted for Elimination by the American War Machine and Cheney's Henchmen, Baghdad's Cats Are Befriended by an English Mercenary," "Yellow Two Is Shot and Maimed for Life at Fort Hood in the United States Army's Latest Criminal Offense Against Cats," and "Lake Lanier's Cats Face an Uncertain Future Following Their Ouster by the Liars and Defamers at the United States Army Corps of Engineers.")

Besides those premeditated and intentional liquidations, it slaughters even more of them unintentionally with all the bombs and ordnance that it so indiscriminately drops on those living in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, and countless other countries. Not only do those bombs and shells kill scores of cats and other animals but they also contaminate both land and water. As this nation's largest user of petrol, the United States military also contributes mightily toward the warming of the planet.

In conclusion, since no recent updates on Milo have been posted online it has not been possible to ascertain how that he is currently doing. Given that in just three short years he was able to have mastered the vagaries of German Grammatik that so confounded Mark Twain, he quite obviously is a very smart cat who should not have any difficulties in quickly learning English. (See "The Awful German Language" in Appendix D of Twain's 1880 book, A Tramp Abroad.")

By living in the wild for two months, however, he undoubtably has picked up some of the colorful vocabulary of his American cousins. McFadden therefore should not be too shocked if her perfect little German gentleman has now morphed into a rather saucy Americanized tom.

Photos: Facebook (Milo), Pure Gold Pet Trackers (Connolly and her dogs), and Harvard Magazine (McFadden).