SALISBURY, UK: This is a special lost cat story. Frankie was missing for 2 weeks when his owners, Mr and Mrs Clarke, saw him in the window of a locked up Cancer Research charity shop. It seems that he had been trapped in the shop for the entire time. The shop was closed during the coronavirus lockdown.
In another peculiar twist it also seems that he did not go to the toilet the entire time as there was no ‘mess’ in the shop:
And when we finally got in, he hadn’t made any mess, all he’d done was pull a load of toys off a shelf to make a bed
Mrs Clarke was astonished to see him. It is believed that he had fallen into the shop through a hole in the roof and dislodged a ceiling tile on the way down.
The Clarkes contacted Cancer Research and they were reunited with Frankie after several hours of waiting.
They’d searched high and low and were distraught at losing him. They’d tried everything to find him without success and then suddenly there he was looking out of the shop window rubbing his head against the glass keen to meet up.
Frankie had lost a quarter of his body weight. I’m surprised he hadn’t lost more. Did he eat or drink at all? I doubt it but we’ll never know. There may have been some water at the back of the store. But domestic cats have an enormous capacity to survive under this sort of isolation. There are many stories of cats being locked in containers and such like for a month and surviving but never in a locked shop as far as I know.
