A Utah housecat was reunited with its parents recently after a nap in her favorite hiding place turned into a 6-day nightmare.
Galena the calico was accidentally shipped—in the box she had snuck into—all the way to a fulfillment center in Jurupa Valley, California.
Oh yes, epitomizing the internet adage of ‘if it fits, I sits‘ Galena had cozied up inside an Amazon box, unaware that the shoes she was sharing it with were due to be returned.
Owners Carrier and Matt Clark love their cat, as much as she loves sitting in boxes. But her quiet, demure demeanor got the best of her this time, and she needed all 9 lives to survive in the box for 6 days without food or water.
But she was aided, said faithful Carrie, by three miracles. The first was that Matt didn’t seal the box perfectly, and so Galena could breathe inside. The second was that the weather was not too hot at the time. The third was that only one person in the whole Amazon location knew how to handle such a situation: and she worked in returns.
Once at Jurupa Valley, she was discovered by an employee who in turn called their boss Hunter Brandy—the returns manager who also happens to love cats and fosters/rescues them as a side gig. She showed up despite not being at work that day “with a cat carrier and some food.”
“She eventually warmed up to me and let me pet her,” Hunter said in her statement from Amazon. “I could tell she belonged to someone by the way she was behaving, so I took her home that night.”
All this time, the Clarks, who had experienced their cat simply vanishing without a trace were in a dire fret. They searched for hours around their home, put up flyers in their neighborhood of Lehi, called friends and alerted neighbors, but eventually there was nothing more that could be done.
Hunter eventually took Galena to a vet to make sure it was recovering from its ordeal and to check for a microchip. Galena was microchipped, leading to a phone call that Carrie first thought was a joke.
“Galena must have snuck into the box without him seeing and without us knowing, and then he [Matt] came back and taped the box back up,” Carrie Clark said. “She loves to hide in boxes, so she was pretty happy in there. She didn’t make any noise.”
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“We literally had emotions of laughing hysterically to crying hysterically,” she told CNN. “They were so intense. It was just the strangest emotion feeling both of those at the same time.”
A lover of cats, Hunter asked Carrie if she could record the meeting after they drove down to California to pick up Galena.
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“This moment (and all the rest of her life with her family) would not have been possible had she not been microchipped!” Hunter wrote on a Facebook post. “Altho I most definitely would have kept her and loved her to pieces myself had she not been chipped, her family would never have known what happened to her and that thought breaks my heart.”
GNN has reported on how science has shown that cats will find boxes to sit in even if the box itself is an optical illusion. There’s a strange if almost unbelievable lesson in the story of Galena and the Amazon box: if you’ve got to mail something big, check for fur before sending.
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