Found a cat
You have found a stray. Now what?
Most of the cats people ring us about as strays turn out to have a home two streets away. A few are genuinely lost or dumped. A small number need a vet within the hour. Working out which one is in your garden is the whole job.
First, do not feed it
This is the hardest bit of advice to follow and the most important.
If you feed a cat that has an owner, it will keep coming back to you, and it may stop going home for meals altogether. People have lost cats to well meaning neighbours who fed them for a fortnight. Owners then get told their cat "looked starving", when the cat was simply working two addresses.
The exception is a cat that is genuinely thin, weak or clearly struggling. Then feed it, and get on with the rest of this list quickly. Even then, be aware that a skinny cat is not always a hungry cat. Kidney disease, an overactive thyroid and diabetes all cause weight loss in cats whose owners are already treating them.
Which kind of cat is it?
Before you do anything, work out what you are looking at.
That ear tip matters. It is the standard mark for a community cat that has already been trapped, neutered and returned, and it is there so nobody puts that cat through it twice.
The paper collar trick
If the cat is friendly enough to touch, this is the single most useful thing you can do, and it costs nothing.
- Cut a strip of ordinary printer paper. Not card, not photo paper. It has to tear easily if the cat snags it on a fence.
- Write your phone number and something like: this cat has been visiting me and I am worried it is a stray. Please text me if it is yours.
- Fasten it with a small piece of sticky tape, loose enough to slide two fingers underneath.
- Give it three to seven days. If the cat has a home, the owner will usually get in touch.
If the collar comes back with a reply, mystery solved. If it disappears with no contact, try once more. If nothing after a week of trying, you are probably dealing with a real stray or a missing cat.
We will send you a paper collar
We keep proper paper collars made for exactly this job, printed with the right wording and designed to tear safely. If you are in Bradford and you would like one, email info@thecathouserescue.com and we will post one out to you free of charge.
Get it scanned for a microchip
Any vet will scan a suspected stray for a microchip free of charge, and it takes seconds. Ring first so they know you are coming, and take the cat in a carrier rather than loose in your arms or a cardboard box. Plenty of vets and rescues will lend a carrier.
Microchipping has been a legal requirement for owned cats in England since June 2024, but many owners are unaware of this, so some cats still may not have one. Another problem you may face is the chip may never have been registered, or the details may be years out of date. If that happens the vet can often trace which practice implanted it, which is another thread to pull.
If you cannot get the cat to a vet, most local cat rescues can come out and scan for a microchip instead. We can, and so can others in the Bradford area. If the cat will not go in a carrier, or you have no way of getting there, ask rather than giving up on it.
Put the word out
- Knock on doors. Word of mouth still reunites more cats than anything else.
- Post in local Facebook groups. Use the lost and found pet pages for Bradford, but post in ordinary community and neighbourhood groups too. If the cat lives nearby and nobody has realised it is missing, its owner will never think to look on a missing pets page. Check what has already been posted while you are there, in case someone is looking for it.
- Put up found posters, and not just on your own street. Cats roam a long way, and unneutered males roam furthest of all, so go several streets out. Ask to put one up in the places people actually stand about reading noticeboards, like the supermarket, the corner shop, the vet, the coffee shop and the community centre.
- Ring local vets. Owners often ring them first, and practices keep lists of missing cats.
- Search the national lost and found registers, and list the cat as found on them. Animal Search UK at animalsearchuk.co.uk, Pets Located at petslocated.com and the Pet Register at nationalpetregister.org are the main ones. Owners who are looking properly will be on these, not just Facebook.
Be careful who you hand a cat to
Post a found cat on Facebook and you will get comments within minutes from people offering to hold the cat until a rescue space comes up. Some of them are exactly what they say they are. Some are not.
There are people who collect animals and keep them in cramped, filthy conditions. There are others who will claim to be a rescue, or claim they can take the cat on, when they intend to sell it, breed from it, or worse. It is a known problem and it happens in this area.
So before you hand any cat to a stranger:
- If they say they are from a rescue, look the rescue up yourself and contact it directly. Do not use a number or link they give you
- Check the rescue is a registered charity. You can search the Charity Commission register online in under a minute
- Ask where the cat will be kept, and ask to see it. Anyone genuine will be glad you asked
- If something feels off, say no. You are allowed to
A cat sitting safely in your shed for another few days is a far better outcome than a cat handed to the wrong person in an hour.
One more thing about Facebook, because we hear it every week. People tell us they posted, nobody claimed the cat, and now it needs a rescue space. Then we go out, and the cat lives four doors down. The owners were not on Facebook, or the cat was never missing in the first place, so nobody was looking for it.
Facebook on its own is rarely where a cat gets reunited with its owner. It is one step out of five. The door knocking, the paper collar, the microchip scan and the lost and found registers are the ones that actually find owners.
No microchip does not mean no owner
This is the one we correct most often. People find a cat, get it scanned, there is no chip, and they take that as proof it belongs to nobody.
It is not. Microchipping owned cats has only been a legal requirement in England since June 2024, plenty of owners still do not know about it, and enforcement is thin on the ground. Older cats who were never done, and cats in households where money is tight, are the ones most likely to have no chip. Those cats are still very much somebody's.
An unchipped cat means you have lost one way of finding the owner. It does not mean there is no owner to find. Keep going with the other four.
When it is an emergency
Some of this cannot wait for paper collars and Facebook posts.
Get to a vet now if you see
- Hit by a car, or any obvious injury or bleeding
- Not putting weight on a leg, or dragging the back end
- Breathing with an open mouth, or fast and laboured breathing
- Collapsed, unresponsive, or having a fit
- Straining to pass urine with nothing coming out, which is a blocked bladder
- A wound with flies or maggots on it
- Very thin, cold, and too weak to stand
- A kitten that is cold, floppy and not crying
Take the cat to the nearest vet, or ring them if you cannot safely handle it. Tell them plainly that it is a stray and not your cat, so everyone is clear from the start about who is responsible for the bill and for decisions.
If you cannot catch an injured cat, do not chase it. A frightened injured cat will run into a road. Ring a local rescue or the RSPCA on 0300 1234 999 and give them the exact location.
If you have found kittens, wait
Kittens on their own is the one where people mean well and make it worse.
A mother cat leaves her kittens regularly, to eat, to drink, and to check the area is safe. She will not come back while you are standing there. Cats Protection advise keeping away for three to four hours and then checking, and if you want to know whether she has been back, sprinkle a little flour around the nest and look for paw prints.
The rule
If the kittens are warm, quiet, clean and have round bellies, mum is coming back and you should leave them alone. Taking unweaned kittens away from their mother lowers their chances, badly. She is better at this than any of us.
Step in if they have been alone more than about four hours with no sign of her, or if they are cold, wet, crying constantly, or in genuine danger from a road, a dog or the weather.
If you do need to step in, ring a vet or a rescue the same day. Very young kittens need feeding through the night and go downhill fast.
If it is feral
A feral cat is not a pet that has gone wild. It has never lived with people and will not settle in a living room. Trying to catch one by hand ends with you at A&E and the cat more frightened of people than before.
The right answer for ferals is trapping, neutering and returning them to the place they know, which is what we and other rescues do. Never trap a female who is feeding kittens without knowing where those kittens are, because you will starve them.
If there is a colony near you in Bradford that is growing, tell us. That is exactly the work we do, and it is far easier to deal with at six cats than at twenty.
Where you stand legally
Cats are not treated like dogs in law. The council will not come out for a stray cat, and there is no legal duty on anyone to collect it. Cats are also legal property, so you cannot simply decide to keep one you have found.
Since the Pet Abduction Act 2024 came into force on 24 August 2024, taking a cat from the lawful control of its owner is a specific criminal offence in England and Northern Ireland, carrying up to five years in prison, a fine, or both. Before that it was dealt with as theft of property, in the same bracket as a stolen phone. The law now treats cats as sentient beings rather than possessions, and police have to record it as its own category of crime.
That is aimed at people who deliberately take cats, not at somebody trying to help one. The Act allows for a lawful authority or reasonable excuse. But it is the reason you should be able to show what you did, rather than just say it.
Write down every step, and give it a week
Keep a record as you go. Dates, photos of the cat, when you put the paper collar on, when it was scanned and where, screenshots of the posts you put up, which registers you listed it on, which doors you knocked on.
Then, once you have done all of it, leave at least seven days before you treat the cat as needing a new home. Owners go on holiday. Owners are in hospital. Owners are not on Facebook.
If someone turns up in three months saying it is their cat, that record is what shows you made a genuine and reasonable attempt to find them. Without it, it is your word against theirs.
We are a rescue, not lawyers, so if you end up in a dispute over a cat, take proper advice. But the record costs you nothing and it has saved people a great deal of trouble.
What we can and cannot do
We are a small foster based rescue in Bradford, run entirely by volunteers, and we have no building. That means space is limited and we always have a waiting list. It also means we would much rather help you sort it out where the cat is than take it into care.
Email us with the location, a photo, how long the cat has been around and what you have tried, and we will tell you honestly what we can do.
Found a cat and stuck?
Send us a photo and where it is. Even if we cannot take it, we can usually tell you what to do next.
This is general advice and not a substitute for veterinary attention. If a cat is injured or seriously unwell, go straight to a vet.