A cat in the UK managed to survive spending alone in a shipping container for 2 months by just eating spiders and licking up condensation after it got trapped inside it.
In July this year, Monty, the cat, went missing.
Beverly and Paul Chapman, the owners of Monty, did not think much of it because the cat would regularly roam freely and would visit many many houses.
However, Monty, who lives in Cornwall, UK, went missing as he did not come back.
Beverley and Paul got worried so they stuck up posters and shared appeals on social media, however, no one was responding so their fear became worse.
During an interview with a local news agency, Beverley, who works as a teacher, talked about Monty.
She said:
Monty is a bit of a rover – he’s very independent. He has seven or eight second homes – he spends a lot of time at Wynnstay Country Store in Helston, he loves it up there. There’s nothing unusual in not seeing him for a week or so, but we started thinking, ‘He’s been gone for a few days now.’ My son got a message from one of the girls who works up at Wynnstay asking if he was okay because they hadn’t seen him for a few days. We thought that was a bit concerning, so went out calling him. This was the beginning of July. You get to the point where you think he’s getting older, he could have just gone away to die. Plus he’s got the habit of getting into people’s cars and lorries. We were half expecting a phone call from someone saying, ‘We’ve got your Monty,’ but we didn’t hear anything. After a month to five weeks, we hoped for the best but expected the worst. We really had given up hope after seven weeks or so. We thought he must have been hit by a car.
On the first day of Beverley’s work, she got a message on a phone, and it was all good news.
The teacher said that she got a message from a friend that tagged her in a picture on Facebook.
It turned out that someone was outside their storage unit and heard a cat crying.
At this point, they had given up on seeing Monty, but when she got the message, her hopes got high again.
She added:
We had given up hope of seeing him again. I couldn’t believe it – I texted my husband, daughter and son to tell them Monty was alive. My husband Paul came home early from work to see him.
The container that they were talking about is located around 200 meters away from their family house.
When asked about how the cat had turned up there, it is still a mystery and if you ask us on how he survived there for 2 freaking months without food, that’s just something that we cannot answer.
Talking about the condition of Monty when they found him inside the container, Beverley said:
We reckon he lost about two-thirds of his body weight. We think there must have been condensation inside the unit which he licked and maybe he ate spiders. We can’t think how else he would have survived. I don’t know how he hasn’t got killed. He’s got 99 lives, that cat. He’s got an injured leg from when he was run over by a car when he was a kitten – I knew it was him immediately because of his leg. Our other cat Jasper’s nose has been put out of joint – he thought he was going to rule the roost when Monty went missing.
Let’s all hope that Monty would gain the weight that he lost and he will stay more with his original owners.