Your indoor cat got out.

The first hour

Do these in order. Do not skip the first one, however certain you are that she got out.

1. Search your own home. Completely. 4% of found cats never left. Inside sofa bases and box springs, behind and under every appliance, in cupboards and wardrobes, the back of closets, the dryer, the loft, the basement, the garage. Move things. Use a torch. A cat flattens into spaces you would swear were solid.
2. Work out how she got out, and mark the spot. The open door, the broken screen, the gap behind the dryer vent, the window that does not latch. This is the hardest minute of the night and it is also the most useful one: everything else here is measured from that spot. The food goes there, the camera goes there, and the search rings are drawn around it. If you genuinely cannot tell, use the door she is most likely to have used and adjust later.
3. Prop the door open if you safely can. Cats often come back on their own in the quiet hours before dawn. Put her litter tray just outside the door: the smell is a strong navigation cue.
4. Silence the house and go outside and stand still. TV off, music off. Stand outside for two full minutes and just listen before you search anything. You are listening for a rustle, a bell, one short cry.
5. Search the ground against your own house first. Under the deck or porch, the crawlspace, under the steps, in the shrubs against the wall, under your own parked cars, the shed, the garage, behind the bins. A cat that bolts out of a door often does not get past its own property.
6. Then work outward on foot. Do not drive. You cannot see under a hedge at 20 mph, and she is 39 metres away, not three kilometres.

The night search

This is the single most valuable thing you will do. A cat that will not move at 2pm with traffic and dogs about will often shift position at 2am. And in the dark you get an advantage you do not have in daylight: eyeshine. A cat's eyes throw a torch beam back brilliantly from a long way off, from inside a space you could never see into by day.

1. Go out between midnight and 4am. When the street is at its quietest. Yes, really. This is the hour that works.
2. Hold the torch at eye level, beside your temple. This is the part people get wrong. Eyeshine only comes back along the line it went out, so a torch held down at your hip shows you nothing. Use a proper torch, not a phone.
3. Sweep low and level, and move slowly. Under decks, under cars, under sheds, into drains and culverts, hedge bases, woodpiles, porches, crawlspace vents, gaps under fences.
4. Stop every 20 metres. Stand still. Listen for a full minute. Then move on. Go slowly enough that it feels absurd. A proper search of a five-house radius takes over an hour. That is correct.
5. Call in your normal soft voice, then be silent for thirty seconds. The tone you use at home for something good, not the alarmed voice. Shake a treat bag or tap a food tin, then stop and listen properly before making another sound. Whether she answers depends on the cat, on how frightened she is and on how long she has been out, so keep calling on every trip and treat any answer as a bonus rather than the plan.

Food and a camera

This is what searches while you sleep, and over a long search it is where most confirmed sightings come from. Set it up tonight.

1. Put it at the exact point she escaped from. The actual door or window, not the front porch because it is convenient. She navigates by familiar smell and that is the spot with the most of it.
2. Strong-smelling food, and water. Tuna, sardines, the smelliest wet food you have. Smell is the entire point, so dry food does not do it. Refresh it daily.
3. Put out her unemptied litter tray. Counter-intuitive and genuinely effective. It is the strongest scent marker of home territory you have.
4. Add something that smells of you and of home. An unwashed t-shirt, her bed, a blanket she slept on. In bad weather add a box or carrier on its side with the bedding inside, opening away from the wind.
5. Point a camera at it, low down. A cheap trail camera is best by a distance: infrared, battery, weatherproof, made for exactly this. A doorbell camera or an old phone will do. Mount it 30 to 45 cm off the ground, filling the frame with the food. Aim it away from the road and away from neighbours' windows.

The neighbours

11% of found cats were inside someone else's house or building, a garage, a shed, a basement. You cannot search those. Somebody has to ask, and that somebody is you.

Knock. A flyer through the door produces sympathy; what you need is for a person to walk to the back of their garage and shine a light behind the freezer. Almost nobody does that because of a leaflet. A fair number will do it because someone stood at their door and asked.

1. Say that she may not come when called. The single most important line. Otherwise they stand in the garden calling for ten seconds, hear nothing, and report back that she is not there. Silence is not evidence.
2. Ask them to look with a torch, and name the places. Shed, garage, under the deck, crawlspace, under the car. A glance from the doorway finds nothing.
3. Ask the second question: can I check anywhere on your property? "Have you seen her" is the question people expect. "Is there anywhere I could check" is the one that finds cats.
4. Ask whether anyone has started feeding an unfamiliar cat. People feed a cat they assume is a stray for weeks without connecting it to a lost-cat flyer, especially if it looks healthy.
5. Say to call at any hour. People sit on a 1am sighting until morning because they do not want to disturb you. Say it out loud.
6. Cover five houses in every direction, then go wider. 92% of displaced indoor cats in one case series were found within a five-house radius. Prioritise anywhere with a shed, garage, deck, crawlspace, building work, or a car that has not moved in a while.
7. Go back in three or four days. The shed gets opened, someone starts leaving food out, the neighbour who was away comes home. The second pass regularly produces what the first did not.

Listings and shelters

These matter, and they are deliberately listed after the physical search. Under 2% of found cats were found in a shelter. Do these once, properly, then get back outside.

1. File on Petco Love Lost. Free, national, has photo matching, and most shelters use it. Upload several clear photos from different angles. lost.petcolove.org
2. Post on PawBoost. Free to post, wide local social reach. pawboost.com
3. Post in local lost-pet Facebook groups, Nextdoor and Ring Neighbors. This is where nearby sightings actually surface.
4. Visit the shelters in person and walk the kennels yourself. Do not just phone. Descriptions get logged wrong, and a "grey tabby" in the system may be yours. Go back every few days. In California a stray cat must be held six business days, or four under some conditions, not counting the day it arrived.
5. Call local vets and rescues. An injured found cat goes to a vet, not a shelter.
6. Check your microchip registration is current. Right phone number, right address.
7. Put up big signs at corners and junctions. Few words, huge photo, readable from a moving car: LOST CAT, photo, phone number, and the line "may not come when called, please check sheds and garages".

Keeping track of where you looked

After two days every garden looks like one you already checked. People re-search the easy, well-lit half of the radius over and over and never once look in the culvert. Write it down. A notebook is enough.

Resist the urge to widen. As days pass the instinct is to search further out. The evidence says the opposite: search the same close ground more carefully, at a better hour, with a better torch.

Record three outcomes, not two

The blocked list matters more than the searched list. Those 11% of cats found in someone else's building were sitting on a blocked line in somebody's notebook until a person opened a door.

A place does not stay searched. She moves, usually at night, usually after the first day or two of lying still. Re-search ring 1 every night, and at a different hour than last time. After any credible sighting, re-search everything within 50 m of it immediately.

When you see her

Eyeshine under a deck at 2am. What you do in the next sixty seconds decides whether this ends tonight or runs another week.

1. Stop moving the instant you see her.Do not take another step.
2. Get low. Sit or crouch.Standing over a hiding cat is threatening.
3. Look away, blink slowly, speak quietly.A direct stare is a threat signal. Use the normal soft voice, and do not raise it in relief.
4. Angle the torch at the ground, not her face.You can still see her, and she is not being dazzled by a predator.
5. Wait. Minutes, not seconds. Do not block her exit.Let her decide you are safe. A cornered cat panics.
6. If she comes, let her come the whole way. Do not reach out.When she is against you and settled, pick her up firmly, hold her to your body, and go straight inside.

If she will not come

Common, and not a bad sign. Do not force it. Leave food right there, back off out of sight, and note the exact spot. Move the feeding station and camera there tonight. For a cat that is visible but unapproachable, a humane trap is usually the answer, and pushing the approach instead is usually what loses her.

Borrow a trap: shelters, TNR groups and rescues commonly lend them free. Set it where she already feeds, cover it with a blanket top and sides so it reads as a tunnel, put the food past the trip plate, and pre-bait it tied open for a night first if you can.

When you catch her: do not open the trap outside, not even for a moment. Cover it, carry it into one small closed room, shut the door, then open the trap and leave her to come out alone. Expect her to hide and be unlike herself for days. Get her to a vet within a day or two even if she looks fine.

If she is somewhere you cannot reach, a wall cavity, under a building, up a tree, do not try to force her out. No hose, no broom, no dog. Leave food at the opening, put the camera on it, and ask your shelter or a trained searcher.

Do not give up at day seven

34% of cats are recovered by day 7. But 50% by day 30, and 61% within a year. A cat found at week six is an ordinary outcome, not a miracle. Displaced cats often stay hidden for days before they start moving and feeding, and that is exactly when the feeding station and the camera start earning their keep.

Keep the station stocked. Keep the night searches going. Keep going back to the neighbours.

Where these numbers come from

Almost everything here traces to one study: Huang, Coradini, Rand, Morton, Albrecht, Wasson and Robertson (2018), "Search Methods Used to Locate Missing Cats and Locations Where Missing Cats Are Found," Animals 8(1):5, a retrospective case series of 1,210 missing cats at the University of Queensland. doi.org/10.3390/ani8010005

The five-house radius figure and the behavioural model come from the Missing Animal Response Network, whose founder Kat Albrecht is an author on that study.

Where we are being careful

• Physical searching reached p = 0.071. That is the strongest method signal in the study and it does not clear the conventional 0.05 threshold. We recommend it because three independent lines of evidence agree, not because any one is conclusive.
• The behavioural model is practitioner experience, not a controlled finding. It is consistent with the distance data, and several steps here depend on it.
• Microchipping showed no detectable effect in this data (p = 0.331). That is not an argument against microchips. A chip only helps at a scanner, and under 2% of these cats reached one. Keep your cat chipped.
• The sample was self-selected and largely suburban. Dense urban and rural settings may behave differently.

The full evidence write-up, including every caveat and the working, is in the project repository.