Black cat is back home after 5 years on the run

The happy reunion happened Saturday at Petsmart in Hempfield Township, where Sambia Shivers-Barclay met up with him at Ninth Life Rescue Center’s regularly scheduled Saturday meet-and-greet for its adoptable cats. But he wasn’t up for adoption. He was going back home where he belonged.

“It was so beautiful to see the reunion,” said Christine Menchio of Greensburg, a foster, treasurer, secretary and other identities with the all-volunteer nonprofit.

President and founder Jen Johnson held Barak until he got his bearings amidst all the stimuli in the store. Then she passed him over to Shivers-Barclay, who with her daughter Cherra had made the nine-hour round trip from Silver Spring, Maryland.

“It went incredibly smooth,” said Shivers-Barclay, who was smiling broadly in the video that Ninth Life Rescue posted on their Facebook page.

The story had been played out for five years on Facebook. It began Dec. 23, 2017, when the woman and her three daughters, who were traveling from Maryland to visit family in Michigan, exited the turnpike in Donegal to take a break at the McDonald’s on state Route 31. They didn’t realize when they got out that the door to the cat’s carrier had somehow opened, and to their horror, Barak jumped out and ran down an embankment. Shivers-Barclay found a way to go down after him, but he disappeared into the overgrowth and the woods.

The family spent several hours trying to find him, but gave up and continued on their way after leaving information at the rest stop in case anyone spotted him. They cut their vacation short to return the day after Christmas to search again.

Many people joined in the search when the story was posted on Westmoreland County PA Lost & Found Pets’ Facebook page. Shivers-Barclay came back several times over the years, and even returned when a woman from Donegal said she found Barak. It turned out to be a female cat (the woman hadn’t lifted the tail to look) that Shivers-Barclay ended up taking back home. She named her Michelle, and when the cat passed away in 2019, she began fostering cats for a rescue in her own area.

She never gave up hope for finding Barak.

Meanwhile, a black cat showed up last month on a farm in Norvelt and hung around for a few weeks. On Jan. 3, the farmer made some calls asking for someone to take the cat, and Johnson responded. She took it to a veterinarian for a health check, and she also scanned him for a microchip. She didn’t expect a positive outcome because, she said, “Less than 2% of the cats we take in have microchips.”

This one did.

That evening, Shivers-Barclay got a phone call that she wasn’t expecting. Johnson had Barak.

“Are you kidding me?” Shivers-Barclay asked.

“No, he’s right here,” Johnson told her.

Shivers-Barclay was confident that her long-lost cat, now 7, would remember her, and it looked like he did. The posted video shows that he’s loving the loving from Shivers-Barclay.

“We had a big crate for him so that he had lots of room, and he patiently sat in there on the way back home,” she said. “When I put him in the cat room in the house and opened the door to the crate, he strolled out and gave me a head butt. I was expecting him to run and hide, but he just started circling my legs. He immediately responded when I called his name, and he’s been cuddling and taking naps with me. I could not ask for a better reunion.”

Shivers-Barclay had adopted two of her foster cats, Sterling and Faus, and has a Portuguese water spaniel named Blue. The pets are adjusting to each other.

Before leaving Greensburg, she left a generous donation with Ninth Life Rescue out of gratitude for taking in and caring for Barak after he was found.

“They are so wonderful and so kind and so thoughtful,” she said about the volunteers she met Saturday. “The work that they do to get these animals into loving homes is so important. I was honored to make a donation to help them with their mission.”

Shivers-Barclay also has high praise for the many strangers who in past years tried to find her missing cat, and for other people she never met who cared enough to keep the search active on Facebook.

“That shows how much people cared about a stranger who lost her pet,” she said.

Elizabeth Couch Nordstrom of Rector, creator of the lost and found page, stressed the importance of a microchip and/or identification tag for pets, especially a microchip that’s kept up to date.

“Barak is a poster child for the success of microchipping,” she said.

Without that identification, Johnson noted, Barak would have been just another black cat that somebody found.

Barak’s story has been an inspiration in many ways.

“I have had more than 50 people tell me that they never thought about microchipping and now they’re going to get it done,” Shivers-Barclay said. “I’m sure that people in Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina didn’t think about it, or people in tornadoes didn’t think about it. But then something happens and all of a sudden you get disconnected from your animals. A chip can get them back to you, so chip them. You never know when your stable life can take a turn.”