Seven years is a long time for a family to wonder about a cat. For Amber Davidson-Orozco and her sons, Dodger is now back home in Georgia after disappearing during a cross-country move from California.
Davidson-Orozco said Wednesday that Dodger still responds to his name and lets her sons flip him playfully over their shoulders, much as he did before he vanished.
“Oh, he’s there. That super sweet, cuddly, social temperament is still there,” Davidson-Orozco said to The Guardian.
She said Dodger’s return felt especially meaningful for her sons, Schylar and Zachary, who were about eight and five when he disappeared and who had lost their father around that time.
“That’s important,” she said, describing Dodger’s reappearance as if a piece of their childhood had come back.
Dodger’s reunion has drawn national attention in recent weeks and has also highlighted the role of microchipping pets. Dodger had been microchipped, which later allowed veterinarians to identify his family.
Davidson-Orozco’s family adopted Dodger from Miss Winkles Pet Adoption Center in Clovis, California, in 2016. She said the cat, named after the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team the family supported, quickly became part of the family.
The father of Davidson-Orozco’s children died unexpectedly toward the end of 2018, and the family later decided to move to Florida. Davidson-Orozco said she asked a friend to transport Dodger with the family’s belongings, but the cat escaped from the friend’s vehicle and disappeared.
“We always thought about him” in the years that followed, Davidson-Orozco said. “It was like that one thing you keep thinking about.”
Her family later moved to Calhoun, Georgia, north of Atlanta.
In February, someone in Madera, California, about 49.9 kilometres from Clovis, found Dodger as a stray and took him to Fresno Trap and Release for neutering and vaccination. Veterinarians there found he had already been neutered and had a microchip. A scan showed he belonged to Davidson-Orozco’s family.
Sydney Sherman of Fresno TNR, who runs the non-profit with her mother, contacted Davidson-Orozco about Dodger. In a social media post, Sherman said she was flying to Florida in late March for a wedding and offered to bring Dodger with her.
“His family was so excited,” Sherman wrote, adding that she sent Davidson-Orozco videos and pictures of Dodger and held FaceTime calls with the household.
Sherman said she was “freaking out” because she had never flown with a cat before, but said the trip went relatively smoothly. Davidson-Orozco’s family then drove seven hours from Calhoun to meet her at 5 am “to pick up their sweet little man”.
Sherman said it was hard to part with “the handsome, talkative” Dodger because he had won over the people at Fresno TNR while staying with them.
Still, Sherman wrote that the group was “very happy to finally have him home where he belongs with his boys”.
Davidson-Orozco thanked Sherman and her team for “giving their all” to Dodger and her family, who were in Calhoun, more than 2,300 miles, or about 3,700 kilometres, from Clovis.
She said reuniting with Dodger, and finding in the weeks since that he was still the same cat they remembered, brought some healing tied to a difficult period in their lives.
“It’s full circle, losing all your stuff and belongings while having to move, losing your dad, and you get this back,” Davidson-Orozco said. “It seems silly, like it’s just a silly cat. But to the kids and I, it’s different, and it’s because of the timing.”
She also urged pet owners to microchip their animals.
“When you get an animal, you’re obviously not thinking of anything going wrong or anything like that,” Davidson-Orozco said. “But things happen. Situations happen.”
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