Back from the dead: Cat comes back 9 months after woman cremates it

“I checked my Instagram and I see there’s a message from Regina Cat Rescue,” said Desirée Hobbins, 26. “It was like, ‘Hi Desirée, I believe we have your friend here’, and it was a picture of Zeppelin, and I was like, what? No. There’s no way, I cremated him!”

It sounds like a scene out of the Stephen King film Pet Sematary, but for Desirée Hobbins, it’s real life.

In September 2020, Hobbins’ orange tabby cat —  Zeppelin, known as Zeppy — went missing from her Cathedral-neighbourhood home.

Zeppelin would routinely linger in the yard, but after days of not returning Hobbins became concerned.

“I walked around the neighbourhood putting up posters, talking to neighbours,” Hobbins said. “I would run home at lunchtime to look for him. He is my baby… I had him since I was in Grade 12, so he was eight years old.”

For Hobbins, there was a glimmer of hope that Zeppelin would return, but that light dimmed a week later when a post was made on Regina Lost and Found Pets. The post included a description of a cat, similar to that of Zeppelin, that had been found dead on North Winnipeg Street.

A couple of Hobbins’ friends volunteered to go down to the scene of the crime to determine whether or not the cat was indeed her beloved Zeppelin.

“I was driving to yoga and they called me and they’re like, ‘We think it’s him, we’ve looked at so many pictures and he has all the markings. I am sorry, we think it’s him,’ ” Hobbins recalled.

Deeply upset and saddened at the circumstances, Hobbins met her friends at the Regina Humane Society. There, her biggest nightmare unfolded.

“They had him in a box wrapped in this velvet dress that my friend had in her car,” Hobbins said. “I just looked at him and felt like Harry Potter when Cedric Diggory dies and they find him and his dad’s like, ‘My boy! My boy!’

“I looked at him and just knew it was my Zeppelin. It’s him.”

After explaining her story to the Regina Humane Society, the staff asked Hobbins how she wished to proceed.

Right then and there she opened her wallet and paid $300 to cremate her cat.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Hobbins said. “It was one of the top three hardest things.”

As one does after a loss, Hobbins began adjusting to life without her trusted sidekick. To cope, she wrote a song called “Marmalade Muse,” an ode to Zeppelin, and at one point contemplated getting a tattoo of a tiger to represent him.

“We took his ashes out to Wascana Trails and we spread them and I said some words,” Hobbins said. “I just kept living life. My boyfriend even made me a mug with Zeppelin’s face on it. My friend gave me a picture of him in a frame that we have in the living room, you know, had a little tribute to him.”

There was even a new addition to the family — Magnolia, a kitten she adopted in January of 2021.

But one day in May of 2021, Hobbins received a message on Instagram indicating that perhaps Zeppelin hadn’t reached the great beyond.

Two lives down, seven to go: The home away from home

One chilly morning in November 2020, Phyllis Baker was throwing her garbage out in the alley behind her house. For Baker, it was a regular routine until she observed one of the bags she had previously tossed was torn open.

“Some food was kind of dragged out towards the fence,” Baker said. “The next night, same thing. I realized, ‘Oh, there’s something hungry in the yard,’ so I put out some dog crunchies and a bowl of water and the next morning I went out and just a little bit of the crunchies were gone, but the whole big bowl of water was gone. So it was something very thirsty.”

Shortly after this, snow came, and imprinted clearly in the fresh powder were little cat paw-prints.

Immediately, Baker contacted Regina Cat Rescue and requested to acquire a cat house for stray cats. Regina Cat Rescue supplied her with a styrofoam box with a big, fluffy bed, and a little window with a curtain.

“Me and the boyfriend, we built an addition onto the sleeping house,” Baker said. “We built a covered four-walled house and we put in a heated water dish and some food dishes, and we set a security camera in there.”

Sure enough, once the weather got colder, the cats began to appear.  Their 24-hour cat camera, however, quit working.

“I’m not sure when Buddy showed up,” Baker said. “But he first showed up on camera early January and he became a nightly visitor, as well as one original cat I called Rafter.”

Buddy, known as Zeppelin in his prior life with Hobbins, mostly visited the styrofoam hut at night. As the days lingered, Buddy would slowly flash glimpses of himself to Baker.

“He just looked miserable,” Baker said. “He looked like the most unhappy cat ever, but him and I got to be friends. He was very scared of me at first … Eventually, I could pet him and he would rub up against me. He ended up in a few cat-fights and limping and he was bleeding… I just prayed for him.”

Time passed. The snow melted and spring had sprung. In May 2021, Baker contacted Regina Cat Rescue again. She informed the organization she could no longer attend to Buddy as she would be living away from home for most of the summer. Regina Cat Rescue arrived at her house and took Buddy into their possession. A few days later, the cat rescue team scanned for a microchip, leading them to find Buddy’s original owner, Desirée Hobbins.

“I phoned the girl and she was like, ‘We checked the microchip and it doesn’t lie, this is your cat,’ “ Hobbins explained. “I was like, they have the wrong cat, but then how do they even know (Zeppelin’s) name? How did they find my contact information? But they had his picture and it was definitely Zeppelin.

Hobbins said her companion looked a bit different.

“He was healthy and missing a tooth, but it was Zeppy. I just couldn’t believe it was him.”

After finding and cremating the cat Hobbins believed was Zeppelin she put the past to rest, and no longer was keeping up-to-date on which cats were being found online. For her, it was hard to accept the truth.

“I mourned and thought I found Zeppelin,” Hobbins said. “I just did not believe it was real. I had literally gone through such an emotional process of mourning him and finding him and holding that cat’s body.”

Now in mourning was Phyllis Baker.

“I was very upset,” Baker said. “I cried when I realized I had to let Buddy go … he was just a faithful little companion.

“I am glad he’s back with his owner.”

This isn’t the first time this has happened to Baker. Last year she had another cat in her yard who she named Kevin. He stayed with Baker for a week before the owner was found.

The importance of microchipping

When Hobbins adopted Zeppelin from the Regina Humane Society, she was unaware he was microchipped; she only was aware of the small tattoo in Zeppelin’s located in his right ear.

Before going through the process of cremating the other cat, Hobbins claimed the Regina Humane Society did not check for a microchip to confirm the cat was indeed hers.

“When I found Zeppelin I was just so distraught,” Hobbins said. “I just didn’t think to be like, ‘Can you check for a microchip?’. But had they looked or somebody just asked me two questions like, ‘Did you adopt him here?’ or ‘Did he have a microchip?’ you know, there just could have been a couple steps there. But I understand when someone comes in crying and they say, ‘this is my dead cat’ obviously they are going to believe you.”

A microchip is approximately the size of a grain of rice and is inserted under the animal’s skin. Its purpose is to offer a form of permanent identification for a pet.

“Every pet that’s adopted from the Humane Society does have a microchip, it’s part of the adoption fee,” said the society’s Director of Marketing and Public Relations Bill Thorn. “Anytime an animal comes in we do check it. If it’s deceased we’ll check it so that we can get ahold of the owner, if there is one.”

Typically, a pet is considered property under Saskatchewan law.

“We wouldn’t have any reason to question someone that’s bringing an animal in that they had in that kind of situation,” Thorn said. “I mean, they’re bringing the cat in, (they say) “That’s my cat, it died,” I don’t know if we would sort of doubt them and check it in case it’s not really their cat.

“Typically, people don’t bring a cat that isn’t there in for cremation. I don’t know for sure if animals are checked as a part of routine when they come in, but again, we would have no reason to really doubt somebody.”

Hobbins still feels the Regina Humane Society should have been more thorough in their check-list, and she took to calling the organization herself, expressing to them her thoughts on the matter.

“I really do understand if someone comes in, but this obviously happened before to people. They could have been like, ‘We need to take him for a second,’ and in that moment, they could have just checked the microchip. It’s just a scan, right?

“There just could have been a little cross-checking of, ‘You adopted him from Humane Society, it says on our files he has a microchip. Let’s just double-check to make sure,’ because they had asked me the story and they know I just found him on the street.

“(The Regina Humane Society) just said, ‘You came in and told us this was your cat, so we believed you,’ which is fair enough. When you’re so upset like that too you’re not really thinking clearly. Having that microchip is just so important. It’s so perfect. (The) only better thing is if (your pet) had a GPS. Like find your iPhone.”

The ‘after’ life

After nine months away, Zeppelin returned home to the house he grew up in. He now lives with Hobbins’ mother, as she believed it was the best place for him to re-adjust.

“We have three cats now and my mom loves Zeppelin so much,” Hobbins said. “I know it sounds bad, but it felt like I had mourned my Zeppy. He was just kind of different when he came back. He’d been hardened by the streets.”

Although her story has a happy ending, Hobbins still feels some guilt associated with the traumatic event.

“I cremated someone else’s cat,” Hobbins said. “Someone else doesn’t know what happened to their cat. I feel like he got a really good send-off, but I do feel bad. Those people, they’re never gonna really have closure. But I guess in their minds, they can make up whatever story they want to, like maybe he found a nice home.”

Hobbins’ advice?

“Don’t lose hope! Cats are resilient, smart and resourceful. If you’ve lost your cat, it’s a good chance they could be alive. And the Regina Cat Rescue is overflowing with cats right now so any type of fostering is really needed. It’s rewarding and an important thing to do if you have the means because otherwise, these cats wouldn’t even have a chance.”

After the cat-astrophe Hobbins can now look back, a laugh about the matter.

“Zeppelin lives on … It still blows my mind,” she said.

“I was like, 2021 is going to be a good year, and my cat came back from the dead. Now I have a mug with his name on it … And a good story for when I perform that song.”