GRAND HAVEN, MI – When Jesse White picked up the phone on a day last week, the last thing he expected was news about a long lost family member.
, 6130 Airline Road in Fruitport, was a good one – the staff had found Cory, the Whites' medium-haired gray-and-white cat who had been missing for more than a year.
"I was like 'Wow.' I didn't really believe it," he said.
Cory went missing from the family's Grand Haven home in January last year, he said, after she darted out a door left open by one of the family's young daughters. The family went looking for the cat and even put up fliers and checked with the humane society, but she was nowhere to be found, White said.
The loss was especially hard on his daughters, who are now 2 and 4 years old, he said.
"They were very sad and they just kept asking about her every day and wanting to go and look for her," White said.
Cory found a new home in August that same year, when Deloris Millard's grandchildren spotted her running along the cattails of the Grand River.
"Don't go down after it," Millard remembered telling her granddaughters. "It's probably a feral cat."
But they went down anyway, she said, and brought Cory to Millard's deck.
"(The cat) was very thin," Millard said. "You could tell he hadn't been eating well."
They fed the cat and nursed it back to health, but Millard and her husband decided to keep the cat – which the grandchildren had renamed Lump – outdoors, thinking she would eventually leave.
But she didn't, Millard said. Instead, the cat grew attached to the couple. She followed them wherever she went and liked to play chase with Millard's husband, she said.
After taking her to the veterinarian to get her shots, the Millards decided the cat should also get fixed. They took her to the West Michigan Spay and Neuter Clinic on April 9 and told the staff that they were not sure if she had already gone through the procedure.
The staff shaved Cory's belly and noticed a little scar that indicated she might have already been fixed, so they decided to scan her for a microchip, said Anne Munford, one of the facility's directors.
Microchips are about the size of a grain of rice, she said, and are placed between a cat's or dog's shoulder blades. Typically, they contain the owners' contact information and details about the pet, like a basic description and whether or not it has been spayed or neutered.
The White family members gather with their long-lost cat after recently being reunited with the pet. The reunion came about after the cat was scanned for a microchip that contained the owner's information.
When the staff scanned Cory, Munford said, they discovered that the Millards were not the cat's registered owners and saw White's name listed instead. They then called White to inform him that his pet had been found.
White and his family stopped by the clinic right away, Munford said.
When pets are found, Munford said, staff members ask owners to bring in a form of identification and, if possible, a photo of the pet. Although Cory had been missing for more than a year, White still had a photo of her on his phone.
Meanwhile, they also informed the Millards of the situation. Deloris Millard said they were taken by surprise, because they didn't know the cat had a microchip inserted.
"Had we realized that, had we been thinking, we could've had the kids' pet back much, much quicker," Millard said.
She said they had mixed feelings about saying goodbye to Cory. They had become attached to the animal, Millard said, but they were also happy she was reunited with her family.
White said he hadn't met the Millards, but was grateful that they had taken such good care of the cat.
White, Millard and Munford said the situation illustrates the importance of having the microchip process completed for pets.
Munford said pet owners have placed chips in dogs for years, but have only recently started doing it for cats, even though the chances of finding a missing feline are slim. She said having the microchip in pets increases the likelihood they'll be found if they go missing.
"When you lose a pet, if the pet's been microchipped, there's always that possibility, even after a long time, that you'll be reunited," she said, adding that organizations like Pound Buddies and the Harbor Humane Society in West Olive scan each animal that comes into their facilities.
White said the decision to have a microchip inserted into Cory made all the difference in bringing her back home.
"If she didn't have (a microchip), we wouldn't have gotten her back," he said.
-- Email Lisha Arino at larino@mlive.com, and follow her on Facebook and Twitter (@lishaarino).