$1,500 Cat Custody Battle
From the archive: published Apr 4, 2013, 13 years ago. Details may have changed since.
A nine-month cat custody court battle that cost a British woman £1,000 in legal fees — more than $1,500 — has finally been resolved in her favor. Senka Besirevic lost the black-and-white cat named Brandy in 2006. That’s a long time to wait. But she probably never would have gotten her pet back at all if not for a microchip placed in the cat.
Karen and Carl Green said that they found the cat a mile away in their greenhouse. Saying that she thought she was a stray, they renamed her Smelly and even installed a cat door in their house just for her.
However, when they brought the cat to the Orchard Veterinary Centre in March 2012, a vet scanned the microchip and realized that it was Besirevic’s pet. The vet notified Besirevic and then apparently got out of the way. The Greens took the cat and refused to surrender her to the original owner.
Besirevic told UK’s Birmingham Mail that she was then forced to find a lawyer “who had been through the same thing and took on my case. It was a huge battle, I felt like I had lost her for a second time.”
In Birmingham, the police are allowed to go in to recover a microchipped dog but, apparently, not a cat.
Worse, the cat custody case dragged on for nine months, with a date for a full hearing finally set in March. The Greens then claimed that they too had lost the cat — and maybe they did.
In any case, the story has a happy ending because someone turned in the animal anonymously to an RSPCA rescue center. Again, the microchip allowed the rescue workers to locate Besirevic and finally reunite her with her cat … only seven long years after Brandy was first lost.
However, the Greens see it differently. Karen Green told The Telegraph , “She’s making out that we stole the cat and kept her away from her, which we did for the last 12 months, but when we first took the cat to the vet, she wasn’t sure if she wanted the cat back.”
Saying that, in Besirevic’s shoes, she would have taken the cat from the vet immediately, Green added, “I thought, if you need 24 hours to decide to have the cat back after six years, does she deserve the cat?”
Well, maybe, but I think a reasonable person could quibble with how the Greens handled the cat custody battle. What do you think?
[cat photo Orlovic and Wikipedia Commons]