Haughley: Cat returns home with two broken legs

Horace the cat was missing from his home in Haughley for over two weeks. When he returned he had broken his two back legs. Archant

DETERMINED Horace used more than one of his nine lives when he went off on his last adventure.

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The 18-month-old ginger tabby cat was missing for nearly three weeks before he managed to limp home to Haughley with two broken legs.

Owner Kara Hayward, 38, believes he was injured in a hit and run after going missing on March 11.

The mum-of-three said: “I saw him on the Saturday evening, but he did not come in on the Sunday morning. He had gone out before for about a day or so hunting but he would always be here to wake me up for breakfast.

“On the Sunday afternoon I asked my husband, Paul, if he had seen him but he could not remember. I contacted the local vets on Monday to see if anyone had taken him in, but they had not had anything.

“I began to put posters up, I thought that maybe he had been shut in a shed. I had a few phone calls but they turned out to be somebody else’s cats.”

Mr and Mrs Hayward and children Zak, 14, Lucas, 12, and 11-year-old Amber began to give up hope of ever seeing Horace again.

“I was watching a clip of Horace on my phone and it wasn’t doing my health any good, I was worrying about him,” said Mrs Hayward.

But just when they thought Horace was gone forever, the bleoved cat limped through the door of the family home in Ladyfield on Friday, March 30 - 18 days after he was last seen.

He had lost a lot of weight and was struggling to walk with his two broken legs.

“I saw him trying to walk and I could see that something was not right. What was obvious was that both legs were broken, so I took him to our local vets in Haughley but they said that it just does not happen, cats surviving this long, they would have given him five days, 10 days at most,” said Mrs Hayward.

Horace has now had two operations to fix the two broken legs at Christchurch Veterinary Surgery, in Ipswich.

“They said that he was not so badly de-hydrated, he had managed somehow to get water. It was quite amazing, we have all said he is a real friend with a lot of determination. Everyone at Christchurch said how perky he was considering, he is eating everything now,” said Mrs Hayward.

“We had him here for four hours when he came back from the vets and he was laying on my sons’ bed, all the other cats went up to see him and the dog was excited to see him again.”