A cat who had been lost for 11 years was reunited with his family last week thanks to the tireless efforts of an animal shelter employee. Carol O’Connell is the worker’s name, and she works at the Dutchess County SPCA in New York.

Carol said that she noticed a stray cat roaming around outside her house, and it took her three years to get close enough to pet the stray cat. And on a whim, she checked to see if he was micro-chipped. She borrowed a scanner from the shelter and found that the cat was micro-chipped.

“Every year he returned to my house, he became worse and worse, and that’s when I knew either someone had abandoned him, he was just missing or lost, or he was simply a wild cat,” O’Connell said. “He started coming around a little bit more in the mornings this spring, so I started working harder to earn his confidence.”

The chip helped O’Connell to discover the identity and owner of the stray cat. “We were able to find the owner, Maggie Welz, using information from the chip, and learned the cat had been lost for 11 years!” the SPCA reported.

Maggie Welz had been without her pet kitty Tiger for over a decade, so when he showed up in New York, she was overjoyed. Tiger reunited with his mother Maggie after being examined and given a clean bill of heart.

“Unfortunately, someone opened our door, and he bolted, never to be seen again,” Welz claimed. “We were sad, so we moved to another property about 10 houses away a year later, and we encouraged those owners to keep a lookout for him, but he never returned.”

“He was in astonishingly excellent form for having been on the streets for that long,” the Dutchess County SPCA posted on Facebook. “Today he is reunited with his family whom he had not seen since he was 3 years old.”

“I can’t express how thankful I am to them for their perseverance and devotion in ensuring the safety of our cat,” Welz added. “I have no clue where he was during the years in between; I’m sure he could tell us a lot of stories, but the important thing is that he is now with us and will be with us for the rest of his life.”

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