I miss my brother

Lalo was my very best friend! We could often be found napping together in the window of the computer room, or playing a game of tag in the house.

My pawrents try very hard to keep us kitties indoors at all times. In April of last year, Lalo ran outside and went missing for three days. The next-door-neighbor found him hiding in her doghouse, with a big hole in his side and his leg fractured in two places. It cost $1,100 to put him back together again, and Mommy and Daddy really hoped that Lalo had learned his lesson and wouldn't try to sneak outside anymore. Their hopes were in vain. After he healed up from that bad injury, Lalo continued in his old ways of trying to dart out the door every chance he got. Mommy or Daddy could usually block him, and when he did manage to get past them, Mommy would give chase. Sometimes it took a long time to catch Lalo, and Mommy would have to climb over rocks and through scratchy branches to get to him, but she was determined that he wasn't going to ever get hurt outside again.

Lalo's (and our) luck ran out last Friday, September 4th, when Daddy must have accidentally let Lalo out. Daddy says he never even saw him go out, so no one went looking for him right away. And by the time my pawrents realized that Lalo was missing, he was nowhere to be found.

Mommy went walking to the back of our property, and along the trail, she found some humongous animal droppings right in the middle of the trail about 150 feet from our house. She knew they couldn't have been left there by a dog because they are too big. So she Googled "identifying animal scat" and found a web site with photos of the droppings from different kinds of wild animals. The ones near our house match the photos of mountain lion poop. Also, the article said that it is typical for mountain lions to mark their territory by leaving droppings in the middle of their trail. It was only about a month ago that someone told Daddy about a mountain lion trying to take down a horse, right around the block from us! (The horse wasn't killed, but it was badly injured.) Right about that time, Mommy saw a young mountain lion sauntering down the road about a mile from here. Mommy doesn't think it's the same one that was on our property, as that one was too small to have left such huge droppings, but it might've been the cub of the one that was near our house.

Mommy has alerted the neighbors that Lalo is missing, and she has plastered the neighborhood with "lost cat" flyers offering a reward. She also reported Lalo missing to HomeAgain, the company in charge of Lalo's microchip, and they sent out reports to the vets and pet rescues in this area. My family is purraying for a miracle that maybe Lalo just got spooked by that bad ol' mountain lion and ran off, and he will return to us when he feels it is safe. But we know that the odds are against that. I love my brother Lalo very much, and I miss him.