This story has been updated with photos.
The love between pets and their owners knows no boundaries or borders.
A 2-year-old cat who went missing in Yellowstone National Park traveled more than 800 miles to his home in California.
Rainbow (pronounced “rain-bow”), a Siamese cat, ran into the trees during a visit to a Wyoming park in June, according to owners Benny and Suzanne Anguiano, who say the couple from Salinas, Monterey County, didn’t think they’d seen the last of their beloved pet.
But two months later, she got a voicemail from an animal shelter in Roseville, about 30 minutes northeast of Sacramento, saying Rainbow was available for adoption.
Their five-day trip through Yellowstone took a turn for the worse after Benny trekked through the forest wearing bear gear and spent several days combing the park. Their relentless search ended when the park’s reservations expired on June 8, and the couple returned home heartbroken. Benny told Susan that they could not stay in the park forever, and that the park rangers would let them know if Rain Bow was found.
“I knew that, but I made him stay until the very end, that’s for sure. And even when we were driving off, I had the window down. I was still calling him, we were still watching the road. It was pretty traumatic,” Susan told USA Today on Thursday.
Rainbow twin cat Star Jasmine was in her carrier, calling out to her brother when Susan learned that her twin had died. The cat was suffering from being separated from her twin for the first time in her life, and the car ride home was a sad one for her.
The couple were initially skeptical of the call from the shelter.
As despair grew, the Anguianos held on to hope. Park officials say some pets are found months later. When they crossed the state line into Idaho, the couple saw a double rainbow, reassuring Suzanne that Rainbow was “in care.”
But they were in total disbelief when they received a voicemail from the Placer SPCA shelter in Roseville on Aug. 3 saying the cat had been found. Suspecting a possible scam, Susan said she only began to take the message seriously after her husband and daughter were also contacted.
“I said, ‘Take a picture, what if I drove three and a half hours and it’s not my cat?'” Benny said, “So they did, and about 20 minutes later they sent me the picture and sure enough, it was him.”
Fearing false hope, the pair suppressed their emotions until they met the cat, but the moment they saw Rainbow, they knew they were reunited.
“When we found out for sure we all cried. We all hugged each other and cried,” Suzanne said.
Rainbow and Star Jasmine are back to sleeping, playing and jumping together after a tough period of separation. The couple now have three cats, including newcomer Max, who they adopted as a companion for Star while she’s on her own.
The cat lost nearly half its body weight while missing
It’s unclear how Rainbow made it from Wyoming to California, but the journey was rough: Susan said his feet were calloused, dry and cracked.
Susan said Rainbow started out weighing 13 pounds but has since dropped to 7-8 pounds. A veterinarian said blood tests showed low protein levels due to malnutrition and that the family believed Rainbow had not been cared for for 60 days.
“Poor thing, he looked to be about six or nine months old. He was really tiny, just skin and bones. He’d lost half his body weight,” Benny said. “He was starving, and now he’s pulled himself out.”
Susan said both Rainbow and Star were microchipped, as per the regulations of the local shelter where they were adopted. However, the local shelter that performed the surgery said Star’s microchip quickly fell off when she was spayed as a kitten, so Susan said she was glad it wasn’t Star that escaped.
She urges all dog and cat owners to not only microchip their pets, but also to register the owner’s name and contact details, because life can be unpredictable.
“If you love your pet, that’s what you do,” Susan said. “If you want to see them again, that’s what you do. Anything can happen. No matter how careful you are, animals are animals, and just like people, something can happen and they can run away.”