Stowaway cat returns from France

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Dec 2, 2005

MILWAUKEE (AP) -- Emily the cat is back -- after flying home in the lap of luxury.

The curious cat that wound up traveling to France in a cargo container touched down at the Milwaukee airport on Thursday, greeted by its family and a horde of reporters.

A Continental cargo agent handed it over to Nick Herndon, 9, son of the cat's owners, Donny and Lesley McElhiney. Emily meowed and pawed at reporters' microphones as the family answered questions.

"She'll be held onto a lot all the way home. And then when we get home, too, she'll be cuddled a lot," Donny McElhiney said. Its sumptuous return in business class on a Continental Airlines flight was a sharp departure from its trip to France, where it was found thin and thirsty but still alive.

"She seems a little calmer than she was before, just a little quieter, a little, maybe, wiser," said Lesley McElhiney, 32.

Emily vanished from the Appleton home in late September. It apparently wandered into a nearby paper company's distribution center and crawled into a container of paper bales.

The container went by truck to Chicago and by ship to Belgium before the cat was found Oct. 24 at Raflatac, a laminating company in Nancy, France. Workers there used her tags to phone her veterinarian, who called the McElhineys.

Continental offered to fly the cat home from Paris after Emily's tale spread around the world and she cleared a one-month quarantine.

"This was such a marvelous story that we wanted to add something to it," Continental spokesman Philippe Fleury told AP Television News at Charles de Gaulle airport.

After one Continental employee escorted Emily from Paris to Newark, N.J., cargo agent Gaylia McLeod accompanied the cat aboard a 50-seater from Newark to Milwaukee.

"I know it's close to the holidays," a tearful McLeod said. "I'm happy to be a part of reuniting Emily with her family."

On her flight home, Emily passed up a menu of peppered salmon filet and "opted for her French cat food" and some water, airline spokeswoman Courtney Wilcox said.

Apparently all that French food did Emily some good.

"She's bigger and heavier than before," Nick said.