The rise of the pet detectives, as woman pays £900 for one to find her missing cat

A woman has been reunited with her cat after paying almost £900 for a pet detective when he went missing.

Katie Carr, 24, a student at the University of York, was living at her parents' home in Manchester with her cat, 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 to try to locate him.

But after three days of continuous searching, the detective was unable to find Winston.

Determined not to give up, Carr spent the next forty days putting up posters, searching the streets, and making appeals on social media.

Thankfully, her drive to locate the missing cat paid off when she 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.

Read more: Should every family own a cat? Scientists reveal how to communicate with your feline (Yahoo Life UK, 4-min read)

Despite the happy news, Winston's experiences away from home had left him malnourished almost to the point of death, and was deaf and blind.

After a week at the emergency vet to nurse him back to health, Carr now faces vet bills totalling nearly £7,000.

But she says that and the pet detective bill was all worth it to have Winston home again and now fit and well.

"When Winston had been missing for two or three days, we thought we needed help finding him," Carr explains.

"We were leaving out toys and food, things that smell nice to him, hoping to lure him home.

"But when he'd been missing for a week we really started to lose hope and thought that we might not see him again.

"We worried something bad might have happened to him – I felt so helpless."

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Carr describes locating Winston so far from her home as a "miracle".

"He probably only had a few hours left to live at that point because he was so starved," she explains. "He was also 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.

"He needed to stay with an emergency vet for about a week to find out if he was capable of recovering."

Winston has now been home for around two weeks – and has made a miraculous recovery.

Watch: Pet abduction could be a new criminal offence in England

Carr has started 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," she says. "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.

"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."

Read more: Should I get a cat or a dog? (Yahoo Life UK, 4-min read)

The rise of the pet detectives

As Carr's story illustrates the loss of a pet can be hugely upsetting for owners, but as well as going missing, beloved dogs and cats are also at risk of being stolen.

Recent figures compiled by Direct Line Pet Insurance revealed that dog thefts reached a seven-year high in the UK in 2021, with 2760 dogs stolen that year, the equivalent of nearly eight dogs every day.

And it isn't just dogs, further statistics show a 194% rise in cat thefts between the period of 2015 and 2020.

The government is so concerned about the trend, it recently set up Pet Theft Taskforce to curb the rising crime.

But heartbroken pet owners are also enlisting the help of dedicated pet detectives to help track down their beloved four-legged friends.

So what exactly is a pet detective?

A pet detective is someone who specialises in finding lost, run away, or even stolen pets and reuniting them with their owners.

Colin Butcher, who worked in the police service for fifteen years, is one such example, now spending his days tracking down missing pets worldwide.

Butcher says it is not only dog owners that get in contact, in fact around 50% of callers a week are cat owners.

He says his rescue dog, Molly, is the only dog in the UK trained in cat detection and has helped recover 150 felines and counting over the last few years.

Butcher's other successes include recovering stolen cats, racehorses, alpacas, parrots, snakes, a hamster, sheep, and pet birds.

And it isn't just human detectives reuniting grateful owners with their beloved pets. A pair of sniffer dogs dubbed "Lexi’s Angels" have also been helping to track down dozens of missing mutts.

Border collies Diesel and Skye can travel miles over rough terrain and slip through cities searching for pooches that may be lost, injured or stolen.

"There are so many missing dogs and some people just don’t have a clue where the dogs have gone, so obviously, we can help," owner Jennie Alton says of the service her dogs offer.

"The difference with these and other dogs is most are only trained in one thing - scent work, trailing or tracking - whereas these are trained in all three.

"In a sense, they’re like real-life pet detectives."

For information on trying to protect animals from theft the Blue Cross has published detailed guidance for pet owners.

Additional reporting SWNS.