I paid a pet detective more than £900 to find my lost cat and it was worth it for his safe return

A cat has been nursed back to health after it was missing for 40 days and found blind and deaf through starvation. Katie Carr, 24, a student at the University of York, was living at her parents’ home in Manchester with her pet Winston when he escaped through a window.

Distraught at the thought of losing her beloved pet Katie enlisted the help of a professional pet detective at a cost of nearly £900. Despite three days of his best efforts he was unable to find Winston.

After forty days of putting up posters, searching the streets, and making appeals on social media, Katie received a phone call from a vet 12 miles away in Bolton. Winston had been found in a woman’s garden on 15 October, and taken to the vet, where his microchip was scanned.

Unfortunately he was malnourished to the point of near death, and was deaf and blind. After a week at the emergency vet clinic to nurse him back to health, Katie now faces vet bills totalling nearly £7,000. However, she says it was all worth it to have Winston home again - and now fit and well.

Katie said: “When Winston had been missing for two or three days, we thought we needed help finding him. We were leaving out toys and food, things that smell nice to him, hoping to lure him home.

“After the first week, we really started to lose hope and thought that we might not see him again. We thought that something bad might have happened to him – I felt so helpless.

“He had turned up in a woman’s garden twelve miles from where he’d got out. It was really a miracle that this happened, as he only had a few hours left to live at that point because he was so starved - he was having seizures and he was blind and deaf.

“Basically, he had starved so much that his body had broken down all of his fat, releasing toxins into his blood and poisoning his brain. When we first went to pick him up, they said that things didn’t look good for him – he was so sick and they weren’t sure that he would live.

“He needed to stay with an emergency vet for about a week to find out if he was capable of recovering. After that, he would still need a feeding tube, special cat food, and multiple follow ups and blood tests. The initial bill was a few hundred pounds, but it came with the promise of spending far more money if we wanted to see him get better.”

Winston has now been home for around two weeks – and has made a miraculous recovery. Katie has also begun a GoFundMe to help with Winston’s medical costs, which has raised nearly £3,000 in just over a week.

“The reaction has been amazing – we’ve been blown away. We’ve had friends and colleagues and even strangers donate to it. We’ve learnt that a lot of people really do love their pets and can sympathise with how hard it is to lose a pet. When we first got him back, he was still so sick and we really didn’t know if he could pull through. Today, he’s really healthy – almost back to normal.

“He’s still pretty skinny, but he’s running and playing and causing chaos just like he used to. He’s doing a lot better.

“I’m so relieved – he’s my best friend. He’s only a year old, so I’ve always thought that when I get my first house, he’ll be in it, or when I get married, he’ll be there. It’s such a relief to know I still have a lot of years left with him. It makes it all worth it that we did go through all this trouble and money to get him back.”