Earlier this year, a skinny stray cat came through the door of Charleston Animal Society, as so many have before. And as they do with every other found feline, the team scanned him, hoping to hear the high-pitched beep of the machine recognizing a microchip. To their delight, the office computer pinged with a match: Sam, missing since 2013.
“I got a voicemail from Charleston Animal Society, and they go, ‘We have your cat, Sam. Give us a call and let us know if you can get him,” says Jennifer Ravenel, Sam’s long-lost owner. “And so I phoned them and I’m like, ‘I really don’t think that’s my cat.’ I thought they were playing a joke.”
Sam (proper name Sam Sam the Kitty Cat Man) won the stray kitten lottery thirteen years earlier when Ravenel, a lifelong animal lover who frequently takes in wayward pets and rehabs injured wildlife at her South Carolina farm, found him at just eight weeks old in the crook of a tree. Suddenly he had acres of pasture to roam, a family to love, cows to survey, and a barn to call his own. But then, two years later, Spur came into the picture. Like Sam, the young heeler captured Ravenel’s heart.
“Spur is always chasing something, always heeling,” Ravenel says. “He was just relentless, and Sam didn’t like it. He was just like, This is my world, and it’s quiet, and I just don’t like you being here.”
Sam ran away shortly after Spur’s arrival, and Ravenel spent the following weeks searching feral cat colonies and looking around her farm, to no avail. “There are so many coyotes. I figured he either got killed or something got him.”
So when Ravenel arrived at Charleston Animal Society’s shelter and looked into the bright blue, “too-close-together” eyes of shaggy Sam, eleven years older and seven pounds skinner, she was shocked. “I got a little teary-eyed,” she recalls. “He crawled up in my lap, and he’s always liked his ears scratched. So I started doing that, and he just curled right up and turned his little head towards me and started purring.”
Ravenel wasn’t the only one moved; there was hardly a dry eye in the place. Although Charleston Animal Society has hosted some unique reunions in its 150 year history (a pug missing for five years, another cat for nine), they often have to deal with much sadder news. “It takes its toll, so to have a story like this for the team to relish, and just that look on Ravenel’s face—it’s a truly beautiful thing,” says Kay Hyman, the nonprofit’s senior director of community engagement. “I always tell people, ‘Don’t give up. Don’t give up.’”
After the reunion, there was no question in Ravenel’s mind that she was going to give Sam a loving home once again, but there was still the Spur factor. Luckily, in this case, time had healed most wounds. “They danced around each other for a second, and all of a sudden, Sam just cussed him out in cat words. Spur kind of looked at him like, Okay then. And now they get along just fine.”
Sam Sam no longer spends his days wandering the cow pasture and instead prefers to defend Ravenel’s farm from the foot of her bed. “He has no desire to go outside,” she says. “He’ll get about two feet away from the door and he’ll look around and be like, Nope, I’m gonna go back to the bed.”
Only Sam knows what went on in his life for the past eleven years, although some clues reveal the road wasn’t easy. For one, he contracted FIV, an immunodeficiency virus often transmitted through cat bite wounds. “It doesn’t affect him as of now,” Ravenel says. “Later on it may take its toll, but right now he’s a normal cat just happy to be home.” He also lost half his body weight, but indoor life has been treating him well. “It’s nice to pick him up now,” Ravenel says. “I can really feel a full belly instead of skin and bones.”
For now, Ravenel is just happy to have him home and encouraging everyone she knows to get their pets microchipped. “Having him at the foot of the bed, knowing that he’s safe and sound, I’m just elated that he made it. This whole thing to me is just a miracle in itself. It’s so bizarre, and I’m just so grateful.”
In between hearty helpings of cat food and short trips to the litter box, Sam can now be found dozing off mere feet away from sleepy Spur. The two former enemies have found a shared hobby in their old age: napping. “We’re all geriatric now,” Ravenel says with a laugh.
