Jacqueline Lake lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada. Her cat is Baloo. I think she has some sort of mail-order business because she was mailing tire rims to a customer.
While she was packing up the tire rim, Baloo crept into the package without her noticing and he kept completely quiet while she sealed up the package.
Lake says that he is a very curious and docile kitty! And so it came about that Baloo ended up in Montréal which, I understand, is a 17 hour drive from Dartmouth Nova Scotia. For a while Lake thought Baloo had gone missing in the conventional way.
Fortunately (as I further understand it), the courier service contacted the local SPCA and they tracked down Baloo’s owner, Jacqueline Lake.
The next problem was how to reunite them. As it happens the SPCA have a network of volunteers and they work in partnership with an organisation called Freedom Drivers. These are people who transport animals to rescue centres. This was fortunate because Jacqueline did not have the money to travel to Montréal to get her cat back.
One person from Freedom Drivers transported Baloo to Truro Nova Scotia. I think he or she was taking a puppy to Truro and conveniently took a long Baloo at the same time. A guy called Ryan Dixon and his mother dealt with the last 90 km of the journey back to Dartmouth. What a great job they did. I have an enormous respect for volunteers who transport rescue cats around America.
And that is the end of an unusual cat story. Baloo is fine. He appears to be as laid-back as ever. He is a one-year-old tabby cat. Although he was a little stressed out when he got back home.
