Sophie's Long and Painful Odyssey of Multiple Abandonments, a Death-Defying Fall, Life on the Street, and Battles with the Bitter Cold and Deep Snow Leads Her Back Home Again Just in Time for Christmas

At Least for the Time Being, Sophie Has Landed on All Four Paws

"It is extremely uncommon to find a cat that's been missing for this long. That's a credit to the people who were caring for her outside for so long. Sophie really did touch a lot of people's hearts."

-- Vanessa Freeman of Community Cats of Edmonton

Sophie has had a hard, turbulent life that rivals "The Pearls of Pauline." The beautiful longhaired gray, brown, and white female was born on or about October 2013 but nothing else is known about either her kittenhood or the days immediately thereafter.

For all intents and purposes her story therefore does not really begin until fourteen months later in December of 2014 when she was doing time at the Edmonton Humane Society (EHS) and was known as Stardust. How long that she had been unjustly incarcerated there is not known but it generally can be assumed that she was either trapped by the Edmonton Animal Care and Control Centre (ACCC) or dumped at the shelter by her previous guardian.

It would not even be unusual if by that time she already had been bandied about several times between multiple owners and, possibly, even shelters. It likewise is not even known who it was that first dubbed her Stardust.

Her deliverance and new lease on life came when Glenn Stupar of Spruce Grove, a town of around forty-thousand souls eleven kilometers west of Edmonton, visited the shelter and adopted her as a Christmas present for his then fourteen-year-old daughter, Keisha. Immediately thereafter either he or she renamed her Sophie and she took up residence with them in their seventh-floor apartment.

That act of compassion on Stupar's part in all likelihood saved Sophie's life in that the EHS was at that time a notorious feline killing factory. Although in recent years it allegedly has greatly reduced the number of cats that it slaughters, as far back as November of 2015 it was still whacking them at the rate of sixty-eight a month. (See the Edmonton Journal, July 29, 2018, "Edmonton Humane Society Cuts Euthanasia Rate by Half Since 2016.")

This phony-baloney shelter additionally was an especially uncaring and slipshod operation. For example, on March 27, 2018 two of its employees took receipt of an unspecified number of animals from the Grand Prairie Regional Animal Care Facility, four-hundred-fifty-four kilometers to the northwest, and proceeded to drive them back to Edmonton.

Upon arrival, something went terribly haywire when a trio of young cats -- four-year-old Lucky, one-year-old Magic, and two-year-old Chance -- were inexplicably left locked in their cages inside their transport van without food, water, heat, and litter boxes for the following twenty-three days. Compounding their already desperate plight, the overnight temperature outside during that period hovered slightly below the freezing point on the Fahrenheit scale.

They were not rescued until April 18th and only then because the EHS needed to use the van. By that time, all of them were suffering from severe dehydration and malnutrition as well as having sustained urine burns to their paws. Their anuses additionally were caked with congealed feces.

Chance also was suffering from severe liver damage but all of them, allegedly, recovered and later were placed in new homes by the Calgary Humane Society. (See Cat Defender post of August 8, 2018 entitled "Under Fire for Allowing Three Cats to Languish in an Unheated Vehicle for Twenty-Three Days Without Food and Water, Staffers at the Edmonton Humane Society Are Now Attempting to Save Their Own Miserable Hides with a Trumped-Up Outside Inquiry.") 

Later in that same year, Integrated Risk Investigations and Security Solution (IRISS) of Calgary gave the EHS a clean bill of health by blaming the entire affair on the snow and employee fatigue and complacency. It even went to the utterly ludicrous length so as to excuse the shelter's negligence by arguing that the cats' cages were "kinda hidden" in an area of the van that normally is used for storage.

With its see-no-evil, hear-no-evil attitude, it is a bit surprising that IRISS did not blame what was done to the cats on either a troublesome case of the piles or an ingrown toenail. (See Global News of Toronto, December 20, 2018, "Changes Recommended at Edmonton Humane Society after Investigation into Abandoned Cats.")

Considering that Sophie easily could have been whacked outright or succumbed to gross negligence, she was extremely fortunate to have gotten out of that feline hellhole with her life. At that time, however, Stupar likely was totally ignorant about how that the EHS conducts business.

The two and one-half years following her adoption are another blank page in Sophie's life. What kind of existence did the "spunky and independent" calico have with Keisha and her father? Only they know the answer to that question and they so far have been remarkably unforthcoming on that matter.

Then sometime during the middle of 2017 Sophie's life took another disastrous turn. "I always go shower, and then I come out and she'd be sitting there, meowing at me like, 'Okay it's breakfast time'," Stupar recalled to the Edmonton Journal on December 30, 2024. (See "Home for the Holidays: How a Missing Spruce Grove Cat Was Reunited with Her Family after Seven Years.") "And that morning, she wasn't. When I went out to the front room and saw the screen I put it all together quickly."

What Stupar and Keisha did in order to have located Sophie is not known but it would appear that they did not do very much in that regard. For instance, how long and hard did they scour their neighborhood for her?

Sophie with Keisha Before Her Dangerous Fall and Disappearance

Did they look underneath any buildings? Comb through any wooded areas? Did they knock on any doors?

Did they fly-post their neighborhood with Lost Cat posters? Did they contact the EHS and local veterinarians? Did they utilize the resources of social media in their search for Sophie?

Most importantly of all, did they have the bon sens to have outfitted her with an old-fashioned collar and a tag? Even in this technology besotted world, they still remain the second best means that owners have at their disposal of protecting their cats. Best of all is to never to allow a beloved cat out of sight.

Even after having spotted what he thought to have been Sophie running across a street about a month later, Stupar still refused to have acted. Rather, he simply assumed in the face of all evidence to the contrary that she had run off on her own accord.

A cat that is given a home, food, and love never does a runner. On the contrary, if she should suddenly disappear it is because some mischief has befallen her and therefore is preventing her from returning.

It is conceivable, however, that the Stupars believed that she had been injured in the fall and afterwards crawled away to die all alone and that would not have been an unreasonable assumption for them to have made considering the intermediate height from which she had fallen. It sounds counterintuitive but, generally speaking, a cat's chances of surviving a fall actually increase, up to a certain point, the greater the height from which it plunges.

That is because once it reaches terminal velocity the force of its impact with the ground becomes relatively constant. Every bit as importantly, the greater the height the more time that it has in order to use its righting reflex in order to land on its feet. The specifics of how that this theory works in practice are not known but given that cats have been known to have walked away from falls of a much greater height, it might not be totally erroneous to classify Sophie's plunge as having been in the dicey middle range of survivability.

The surface upon which a cat lands also is of paramount importance and if Sophie had collided with concrete as opposed to either grass or dirt she could have been seriously injured if not indeed killed. Radiographs likely would be able to determine if she had incurred any fractures but evidence of other types of damage, such as abrasions and internal distress, likely disappeared long ago.

It additionally is entirely likely that she had attempted return to the building but could not negotiate the front door and elevators. On the other hand, such a fall could have left her disoriented and traumatized. 

It is only common sense but cats that get outside or simply get lost usually do not stray far. They are small animals with short legs and there are too many motorists and other impediments standing in their way for them to get very far in this outrageously overcrowded world.

In other words, it would never cross the mind of a cat in Spruce Grove who suddenly finds herself on the outside to think of taking a spring vacation in Fort Lauderdale. Ergo, she is all but certain to be somewhere close by. (See Cat Defender posts of September 22, 2020, January 29, 2021, January 9, 2022, May 23, 2023, and October 16, 2023 entitled, respectively, "Snitch Is Found Alive Fourteen Years after His Disappearance but His Old Owner Refuses to Take Him Back in Spite of the Shameful Neglect Shown Him by His New Caretaker," "Mocha Is Saved from an Almost Certain Death at a Shelter by the Enduring Love and Compassion of Her Former Owner Who Had Not So Much as Laid Eyes on Her in Thirteen Years," "Marley Is Reunited with Her Family after Having Gone Missing Nine Years Ago but Her Deliverance Does Not Establish Either the Efficacy or Desirability of Microchipping Cats," "Tilly Is Returned to Her Owner after a Seventeen and One-Half Year Separation but Their Reunion Is Destined to Be, Sadly, a Bittersweet One," "Believed to Have Perished in the Montecito Mudslides, Patches Turns Up at a Shelter Three Years Later On Where She Is Adopted by Her Deceased Owner's Boyfriend," and "Daisy Is Found in Poor Health Wandering the Forbidding Streets of Caerphilly Eleven Years after She Vanished Without So Much as a Trace.") 

 

Although cats such as Mimine, Mayhem, and Cookie have purportedly used their well-developed spatial memory and the movements of the sun in order to have traversed staggering distances in order to track down their former owners, the herculean feats of the latter two were made all the more incredible owing to the fact  that their guardians had changed addresses while they were, supposedly, on the road. (See Cat Defender posts of April 27, 2007 and April 10, 2014 entitled, respectively, "A French Chat Named Mimine Allegedly Walks Eight-Hundred-Thirty Kilometers in Order to Track Down the Family That Had Abandoned Her" and "Mayhem Inexplicably Finds His Way to the New Address of the North Carolina Woman Who Earlier Had Cruelly Abandoned Him," plus the Nice Matin, December 12, 2014, "Un chat, disparu à Grasse, parcourt mille kilomètres pour retrouver sa maîtresse en Normandie.")    

 

Many lost cats that later are found far from home have been stolen and then dumped. (See Cat Defender posts of November 16, 2007, December 11, 2014, January 29, 2020, and November 15, 2023 entitled, respectively, "Fletcher, One of the Cats Abducted from Bramley Crescent, Is Killed by a Motorist in Corhampton," "Uprooted from Home and Left Stranded Thousands of Miles Away, Spice Discovers to Her Horror That Not All the Ghouls and Goblins in This World Are Necessarily to Be Found on Halloween," "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," and "Basil Is Abducted, Shot in the Head, and Her Body Dumped in a Creek and, Although a Neighbor Was Immediately Implicated in Her Death, Apparently No Arrest Has Been Made More Than Two Months Later.")

At other times, cats take refuge in passenger cars and other vehicles and as a result wind up halfway across the country. (See Cat Defender posts of November 6, 2006, December 12, 2007, and June 1, 2012 entitled, respectively, "Trapped in a Moving Van for Five Days, a Texas Cat Named Neo Is Finally Freed in Colorado," "Bored with Conditions at Home, Carlsberg Stows Away on a Beer Lorry for the Adventure of a Lifetime," and "A Tattoo Unravels Burli's Secret Past but It Is a Radio Broadcast That Ultimately Leads to His Happy Reunion with His Forever Grateful Current Guardian.")

They even have wandered onto both freight and passenger trains and subsequently been transported to distant cities. (See Cat Defender posts of June 7, 2007 and April 5, 2024 entitled, respectively, "Rascal Hops a Freight Train in South Bend and Unwittingly Winds Up in Chattanooga" and "Lost and All Alone on the Rails, a Young Cat Is Befriended and Saved Through the Efforts of a Kindhearted Employee of the Chemins de fer Luxembourgeois.")

Sophie Toughed It Out at a Car Wash for Eighteen Months

A few of them even have, through no fault of their own, found their way onto ships and as a consequence wound up in foreign countries. (See Cat Defender posts of December 9, 2005, May 31, 2007, and July 25, 2014 entitled, respectively, "An Adventurous Wisconsin Cat Named Emily Makes an Unscheduled Trip to France in the Hold of a Cargo Ship," "Port Taranaki Kills Off Its World Famous Seafaring Feline, Colin's, at Age Seventeen," and "Poussey Overcomes a Surprise Boat Ride to Dover, a Stint on Death Row, and Being Bandied About Like the Flying Dutchman in Order to Finally Make It Home to La Havre.")

Airplanes also have played a role in cats being transported to the ends of the earth before being dumped by their utterly disgraceful owners and others. (See Cat Defender post of August 26, 2015 entitled "A Myriad of Cruel and Unforgivable Abandonments, a Chinese Puzzle, and Finally the Handing Down and Carrying Out of a Death Sentence Spell the End for Long-Suffering and Peripatetic Tigger.")

Some owners even have been so careless as to have sent their cats through the post. (See Cat Defender post of July 21, 2008 entitled "Janosch Survives Being Sent Through the Post from Bayern to the Rhineland" and Ruhr24 of Dortmund, May 13, 2022, "Nordrhein Westfalen: Katze aus Versehen mit der Post Funf-Hundert Kilometer weit verschickt.")

Once Sophie had found herself on the street her first order to business would have been to have attended to any injuries that she may have sustained in her fall. Following that, she would have been forced to confront the reality that she now was homeless and totally on her own.

Since absolutely nothing has been revealed about the first fourteen months of her life, it is impossible to know if she had had any previous experience of either being on her own or with the great outdoors. If the answer to both of those questions is no, she would have been left with precious little time in order to have gotten up to speed or to have perished.

Most pressing of all, she now had to procure her own food, water, and shelter from the elements. Secondly, she quickly had to learn how to avoid such prolific feline predators as motorists, poisoners, dogs, and an assortment of wild animals, such as cougars, wolves, and coyotes.

Thirdly, she had to stay out of the traps set for her and other members of her species by the ACCC. For example, in 2021 that agency admitted to killing at least one-hundred-forty-six cats and seventy-nine kittens. How many other cats that it killed in the field and did not even bother to report is not known. (See the Edmonton Cold Weather Animal Rescue Society, no date, "Animal Care and Control Centre Euthanasia Policies.")

"Communities throughout Canada share an immense feral cat overpopulation. Many thousands of healthy, adoptable cats are euthanized each year because we simply don't have enough homes for them all. Euthanasia due to homelessness is the largest cause of death in cats," Hanna Booth of the Toronto Feral Cat TNR Coalition admitted recently. "An estimated eighty per cent of kittens are born from feral mothers; and every kitten born is competing for adoption against cats already in the shelter system." 

The biggest threat to her continued existence however would have come from those two-legged monsters who enjoy torturing, mutilating, and killing both small and large cats and Edmonton and Alberta are chock-full of them. (See Cat Defender posts of August 26, 2018, November 25, 2015, and January 21, 2018 entitled, respectively, "The Brutal Slaying and Mutilation of Bebe Has Reaffirmed Edmonton's Longstanding Claim to the Title of Being Canada's Most Violent, Sadistic, and Murderous City When It Comes to Cats, "A Cruel Teenage Drunkard and Dope Addict Who Bound a Cat and a Dog with Tape Before Killing Them Is Let Off Easy by a Calgary Court," and "Steve Ecklund's Savage Killing of a Cougar and Vainglorious Gloating, Strutting, and Preening Are Resoundingly Applauded by Canada's Ever Obliging Media and Complicitous Universities.")

Clearly, Edmonton in particular and Canada in general is no place for any cat, big or small. It accordingly is nothing short of a miracle that Sophie survived and in that regard she likely owes her life to some unknown individual who took her in and cared for her for about five years before heartlessly abandoning her once again to the unforgiving streets.

It therefore was not until approximately July of 2023 that she once again showed up on anyone's radar screen and that occurred when she unexpectedly arrived at an unidentified car wash a scant four to five kilometers removed from Stupar's apartment and took up residence in a crevice in a concrete wall in the rear. Over the course the following eighteen months she was fed by an assortment of individuals from Sobeys supermarket, a next-door liquor store, and a nearby condominium but apparently not by anyone connected to the car wash.

To most area denizens she became known as the "car wash cat" but to retirees Bob and Maureen Baynes she was known as Flossie. "They would go every single day at noon to feed her. They would call for her, watch her eat, just kind of hang out with her," Jess Hood of Community Cats of Edmonton related to the Edmonton Journal on December 30th. "It was almost like it (sic) was their cat. They considered themselves her grandparents."

While having the Bayneses and other concerned citizens to feed her sans doute made her life somewhat easier, it contributed absolutely nothing toward her safety. Just as closeness only counts in pitching horseshoes, being an "almost" guardian does not count for much when it comes to caring for a cat. 

Furthermore, they cruelly left her to brave the elements which in Edmonton would test the survival skills of an eskimo. For instance, winter arrives in October and lasts until May and it brings with it below zero Fahrenheit temperatures and 48.6 inches of snow each year.

Not surprisingly, January is the coldest month of the year with daytime temperatures reaching an average of only 21.6 ° Fahrenheit with the thermometer plunging to an overnight average of -14.7° Fahrenheit. Absolutely no one who cared anything about a cat would deliberately leave it outside in such deadly cold.

Jess Hood Feeding Sophie in the Snow at Her Hole-in-the-Wall Refuge

Nobody ever has been concerned enough to even so much as hazard a guess as to the number of cats that Old Man Winter claims each year in Edmonton and elsewhere around the world but the total surely must be astronomical. Even those lucky few that somehow manage to persevere are often left crippled for life with missing appendages that have been lost to frostbite. (See Cat Defender posts of May 8, 2009, January 21, 2010, March 25, 2011, February 2, 2015, February 23, 2015, and March 23, 2019 entitled, respectively, "Domino, Feral and All Alone, Faces an Uncertain Future in Wisconsin Following an Unplanned Trip to Arizona," "Trapped Outdoors in a Snowstorm, Annie Is Brought Back from the Dead by the Compassion of a Good Samaritan and an Animal Control Officer," "Compassionate Construction Workers Interrupt Their Busy Day in Order to Rescue Chabot-Matrix from a Stream in Maine," "Cruelly Denatured and Locked Up Indoors for All of His Life, Nicky Is Suddenly Thrust into the Bitter Cold and Snow for Twenty-One Consecutive Days with Predictably Tragic Results," "Abandoned to Tough It Out in the Deadly Michigan Cold and Snow, Flick Sustains Horrific Injuries to His Front Paws When They Become Frozen to a Porch," and "Fluffy Is Brought Back from the Dead after She Is Found Comatose in a Sarcophagus of Frozen Snow and Ice in Frigid Montana.")

A cat's odds of surviving the cold, snow, and ice of winter are reduced to practically zero whenever foul play is involved. (See Cat Defender posts of January 13, 2006, March 5, 2007, December 9, 2008, March 14, 2015, February 26, 2022, July 10, 2022, and March 12, 2024 entitled, respectively, "Montana Firefighters Rescue a 'Lucky' Calico Cat Who Was Caged and Purposefully Thrown into an Icy River," "Run Down by a Motorist and Frozen to the Ice by His Own Blood, Roo is Saved by a Caring Woman," "Shaved from Head to Tail and Left to Freeze to Death in the Ontario Cold, Chopper Is Saved at the Last Minute," "Ace Is Found Frozen to a Porch with His Eyes Gouged Out but the Authorities Are Too Lazy, Cheap, and Ailurophobic to Go After His Assailant," "Intentionally Blinded, Crippled, and Abandoned to Freeze to Death in a Locked Cage at a Rest Stop on Interstate 95 in Connecticut, Highway Not Only Perseveres but Now Has Hope for a Brighter Tomorrow," "Unspeakably Mutilated and Then Dumped in the Bitter Cold, Highway Amazingly Defies the Odds and Now Has a New Guardian, a Home, and a Second Chance at Life," and "In One of the Most Abominable Acts of Cruelty to a Cat in Recent Memory, a Vile Conductress on the Trans-Siberian Railway Hurls Twix to His Death in the Bitter Cold and Snow of Kirov.") 

The next chapter in Sophie's topsy-turvy life began to unfold in May of last year when her plight belatedly came to the attention of an unidentified woman who contacted Community Cats. Having previously adopted from the charity, she sought its assistance in trapping her but that, regrettably, proved to have been a chore beyond its expertise.

"She (Sophie) was scared of everything," Hood told the Edmonton Journal on December 30th. "A car would drive by, somebody would get out of their vehicle, honking -- anything would scare her, and she'd run back into the hole."

In frustration, Hood resorted to the inhumane expedient of attempting to starve Sophie to death by advising others not to feed her. Not only is starving a cat patently immoral but it also endangers her life in that it forces her to venture far and wide, mostly at night, in order to search for food. That in turn brings her into conflicts with motorists, dogs, and other prolific feline predators.

"I had to really gain her trust," Hood acknowledged to the Edmonton Journal but anyone who believes that starving a cat is the way to gain its trust is delusional. Au contraire, it retards the socialization process.

It is a mystery as to why that Animal Control officers never seem to have any difficulties in trapping cats whereas so many rescue groups tend to be totally incompetent in that regard. For example, during December of 2022 and January of 2023 it took the Lewis County Humane Society of Glenfield in upstate New York more than a month in order to have successfully corralled a beautiful longhaired yellow and white tom named Warden at a trailer park in nearby Lowville.

That was in spite of the fact that he had been savagely chewed up by either a dog or a coyote and was all alone in enough snow and sub-zero Fahrenheit temperatures as to have made Spruce Grove look like Miami Beach. (See Cat Defender post of March 8, 2023 entitled "Mauled to Within an Inch of His Life by Either a Dog or a Coyote and Afterwards Left to Suffer in the Bitter Cold and Deep Snow for More Than a Month by the Lewis County Humane Society, Warden Not Only Perseveres but Now Has Hope for a Better Life.")

None of that criticism is meant in any way to minimize either the practical difficulties or the moral dilemmas that are involved in deciding what is best for any homeless cat, especially one that has been roughing it for any length of time. Nevertheless, rescuers ideally need to be proficient in both short-term as well as long-term trapping strategies.

The first is required whenever a cat's life is in imminent danger, such as when it is being evicted from a building or an area. (See Cat Defender posts of June 10, 2005, March 31, 2006, and November 2, 2017 entitled, respectively, "The War on Terrorism Costs Cats Their Home -- and Maybe Also Their Lives," "The Idaho Humane Society Lends Its Support to the Demolition of a Derelict Seed Store That Claims the Lives of Dozens of Cats," and "Fate, Circumstances, Rotten Luck, and the Half-Hearted Efforts of Insincere Individuals and Groups All Conspire to Make a Quick End of Morris, the World Famous Glass Bank Cat of Cocoa Beach.")

Another formidable enemy of homeless cats is the United States Government in general and the National Park Service in particular. (See Cat Defender posts of August 7, 2014 and December 16, 2022 entitled, respectively, "The National Park Service Racks Up a Major Victory by Expelling the Plum Beach Cats but It Is Thwarted in Its Burning Desire to Dance a Merry Little Jig on Their Graves" and "The Bloodthirsty National Park Service Is All Set to Trap, Remove, and Kill the Famous Cobblestone Cats of Old San Juan as the Tyrannical Feds Ratchet Up Their Worldwide Campaign of Felicide.") 

More often than not, it usually is cretins who get their perverted jollies by injuring, mutilating, and killing cats that necessitates that entire colonies of them must be relocated. (See Cat Defender post of January 5, 2011 entitled "Gunned Down by an Assassin and Then Mowed Down by a Hit-and-Run Driver, Big Bob Loses a Leg but Survives and Now Is Looking for a Home.")

In cases such as those, cats must be trapped and relocated elsewhere and rescuers need to be capable of pulling off that herculean feat both humanely and expeditiously. Once they have been removed from harm's way, the process of socializing, fostering, and rehoming them can resume.

In those instances where cats are not under immediate threat a long-term approach can be utilized whereby an attempt is first made to socialize then before relocating them. Such an approach also allows their rescuers time in order to line up both foster and permanent homes for them. 

Unfortunately, there are not any guarantees that this approach will be successful. First of all, no cat is truly safe while it is outside and on its own. The clock on its survivability is therefore always ticking.

Sophie with Glenn Stupar as Donny Hendricks Looks On

Secondly, even though a cat may become friendly with its would-be rescuer, there is always the possibility that it will not accept domestication. For instance, it could somehow get out of its new home and disappear.

Therefore, instead of saving a cat's life its rescuer could end up actually initialing its death warrant. All cats are fundamentally different and nobody knows with any degree of certainty how that any of them are going to react to being uprooted, deprived of their unbridled freedom, and domesticated.

Owing to Community Cats' ineptitude, which saw Sophie escape from one trap, it was not until December 15th that Hood finally was able to have successfully lured her into a trap with the promise of some wet food. Afterwards, she took her home with her and confined her to a dog kennel.

Once she had lost the struggle to retain her freedom, Sophie morphed into a surprisingly sweet and docile cat and that allowed Hood to bathe her as well as to remove the tangles from her long fur. She then scanned her for an implanted microchip and that was when she discovered that she was Stupar's long-lost Sophie.

When Hood telephoned him in order to tell him the good news he at first did not even know what she was talking about. "She started off by asking if I ever had a cat named Stardust," he told the Edmonton Journal on December 30th. "It took me a second, because I (had) forgot her original name."

He also claimed that he was unaware that Sophie had been chipped and that is odd considering that just about all cats that come from shelters and rescue groups nowadays are not only chipped but sterilized and vaccinated as well. Quite obviously, he had not paid any of his database maintenance dues.

From this and so many other cases, it thus seems safe to conclude that once a microchip database gains possession of an owner's personal data it never lets go of it even if he fails to pay his annual fees. What else these databases do with that information is not known but it could not possibly be beneficial.

That which is known, however, is that they sometimes stand in the way of owners reclaiming their lost cats. (See Cat Defender post of March 24, 2017 entitled "Tigger Is Finally Reunited with His Family Despite the Best Efforts of the Administrators of a Microchip Database to Keep Them Apart.")

It took a while but Stupar finally came around to acknowledging his good fortune. "You got to pinch yourself. Like what do you mean she's alive?" he exclaimed to the CBC on December 31st. (See "A Tiny Microchip and a Big Community Effort Culminated in a Christmas Reunion.") "It takes a lot to put me into a state of like tingly numb, you know -- like, a shock feeling and that --and that did it."

The poignancy of getting Sophie back just in time for Christmas, however, was not lost on him. "I got her for her (Keisha) for Christmas and now she's getting her back two days before Christmas," he continued to the CBC. "I joked it's the ultimate re-gift."

Hood was seemingly even more elated than Stupar. "I was like, 'I am determined to get her home for Christmas, and it's gonna be a Christmas miracle'," she gushed to the Edmonton Journal on December 30th. "It was just so special. She was a Christmas present. To bring her home again for Christmas seven years later, it's just a full circle."

 

Her colleague at Community Cats, Vanessa Freeman, was a good deal more reserved. "It is extremely uncommon to find a cat that's been missing for this long," she told the CBC. "That's a credit to the people who were caring for her outside for so long. Sophie really did touch a lot of people's hearts."

Au contraire, the available evidence is overwhelming that she survived in spite of the callousness shown her by area residents more so than because of the morsels of food that they tossed her way. As everyone knows but few are willing to admit, this world is chock-full of individuals and groups who make a good living by passing themselves off as caring about cats but who in reality are merely exploiting them for their own selfish reasons and ego titillation.

"Human kindness is like a defective tap," noted English novelist Phyllis James once observed. "The first gush may be impressive but the stream soon dries out."

Even more remarkable than her rescue, Sophie was pronounced by a local veterinarian to be in good health despite all the deprivations that she had been forced to endure over the past seven years. Following that she was reunited with Stupar on December 23rd.

Sophie and Keisha Back Together for Christmas 2024

Given that he already has another resident feline that was given to him by his children a few months after Sophie had disappeared, she will not be residing with him but rather with Keisha and her boyfriend, Donny Henricks. They, presumably, live in either Spruce Grove or elsewhere in the Edmonton area.

Sophie is said to be more "cuddly and affectionate" than ever and supposedly spends her nights in bed with Keisha and Donny. According to Stupar, however, she has not changed all that much.

"She still has some of the old Sophie in her," he declared to the CBC. "She's doing great."

In reunions such as this, the question always arises as to whether long-lost cats still remember their former caretakers and while no one knows for sure the answer to that thought-provoking question, a 2017 Japanese study tends to suggest that they do, provided that they were well treated. "If your cat remembers you after a long separation, it's likely that the bond you shared -- whether through positive experiences or comfort -- left a lasting impression," Brian Foster of the Glass Almanac wrote on January 26th. (See "Do Cats Have Strong Memories?") "Cats may not remember everything, but they certainly retain the emotional connection they've had with people and places that matter most to them."

Like Homo Sapiens, cats also have a well-developed olfactory sense that helps them to recall individuals. "Cats rely heavily on their sense of smell to recall memories, which is why they can recognize their previous owners, even years apart," Foster continued. "Their keen sense of smell allows them to remember a person, a place, or an object long after they've encountered it, creating lasting impressions that transcend time." 

None of that should come as any surprise for an animal that is quite capable of finding its way home from faraway places by following the movements of the sun. Moreover, a cat can tell the time of day more accurately than Tag Heuer as well as to hear a lid being pulled off of a can of Fancy Feast® a hundred feet or more away.

Looking ahead, it is difficult to speculate as to what the future holds in store for the now eleven- and one-half-year-old calico. Stupar told the Edmonton Journal that Keisha was "ecstatic" to have Sophie back but how long that euphoria will last is anyone's guess.

"She's being well looked after, for sure," he vouched to the CBC. 

Considering how disgracefully that he and Keisha failed her the first time around it is impossible to be optimistic on that score. For instance, both Keisha and Donny likely have jobs, a busy social calendar, and they could even be going to school on the side and that most assuredly does not leave much room in their lives for Sophie. Judging from the photographs posted online, the intervening years appear to have, for one reason or another, taken quite a toll on Keisha and she may not be up to properly caring for Sophie. 

The sad truth of the matter is that, except for elderly dowagers, relatively few individuals have either the time or care enough in order to provide their cats with the attention and care that they deserve and require. That is in spite of them living such terribly short lives. Blink once and they are not only gone but gone forever and all time.

Not many owners therefore ever get second chances with their cats. Rather, they usually die suddenly, meet with foul play or, as was the case with Sophie, simply mysteriously disappear.

Since there is not any way of undoing the dirty work of the Grim Reaper, owners who truly care about their cats but nevertheless fail them in some way are destined to be left with profound regrets that intrude upon every waking hour and haunt every night. Perhaps worst of all, there is not any way that they ever can forgive themselves for their sins of omission. 

Even all the happy memories, photographs, and videos are of little comfort. Welcoming a new feline into one's life helps but the pain never goes away.

Hopefully Keisha fully appreciates the rare gift that she has been given and that she will endeavor not to fail Sophie this time around. Doing so could turn out to be just too painful for her to bear.

Photos: Community Cats of Edmonton (Sophie by herself, at the car wash, with Hood, and with Stupar and Hendricks) and Glenn Stupar (Sophie and Keisha).