Getti is back with owner Andrew Mabey and his family after going missing for 9 years.

When the SPCA rang the Mabey family in Wellington on Saturday to say their cat had been found, it came as a bit of a shock.

"I said, 'I hope you haven't, because our cat died three months ago and we don't really want a zombie cat,' " Andrew Mabey said.

But the SPCA insisted it definitely had a live cat, and staff had checked its microchip.

KEVIN STENT/STUFF Andrew Mabey reunited with Getti, who went missing from the family's previous home in Wellington.

Her name was Getti, and she did indeed belong to the Mabeys – except she'd disappeared nine years ago.

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Mabey and his wife, who live in Newlands, went to the SPCA on Sunday, and recognised Getti straight away.

SUPPLIED Getti before she disappeared. She was then a "chubby, fluffy thing", Mabey says. Now she is skinny and rather the worse for wear.

"She looked very very homeless, and dirty and skinny. She's now home and we washed her last night and de-flead her," Andrew Mabey said.

"She fell asleep on my lap last night for about two hours, so she's definitely our cat. I just don't know where she's been for the last nine years."

The couple lived in Berhampore when Getti went missing, and they were sure at the time she had become lost in a gully near the house.

KEVIN STENT/STUFF Getti seemed to know she was home, Mabey says. "She fell asleep on my lap last night for about two hours, so she's definitely our cat."

"We looked for weeks and weeks and weeks, and thought the microchip might bring her back earlier. Then we just kind of forgot about her, to be honest."

In the meantime they and their two children got another cat, which was run over three months ago.

The children are aged 9 and 7, so could not remember Getti. Comparing images of her as a kitten, Mabey said the children were fascinated to see how the big fluffy young cat became such a skinny, slightly mangy adult.

SUPPLIED Getti in 2007. "I just don't know where she's been for the last nine years," Mabey says.

Wellington SPCA manager Nick Taylor said he had seen many unlikely reunions as a result of microchipping.

"We had a cat that was reclaimed that ended up at our Waikanae centre which had originally come from around Hamilton."

Wellington City Council plans to introduce a bylaw making microchipping mandatory and, in the past 12 months, Wellington's SPCA have chipped more than 2000 cats, many at subsidised rates.

After the Christchurch earthquake, 85 per cent of chipped animals were reunited with their owners within three hours. Of those that weren't, only about 20 per cent were ever reunited, Taylor said.

Taylor's advice to anyone reunited with a pet after a long period was to keep them indoors until they had readjusted to domestic life.