A microchip inside Dagney the cat led him back to his owner’s arms Wednesday after four years on the street.

“There it is, my angel baby,” Kelly Damron whispered to the cat as the other felines in the SPCA of Wake County Lost & Found Pet Center meowed, as if watching their own fantasies come true.

Dagney arched his back and paced. “That’s OK,” Damron said. “Take your time.”

Damron thought she occasionally spotted Dagney on the streets after he wandered away from her Cary home in 2003 but never could track him down. She kept his picture in her living room as a reminder and thought about him when the weather got bad.

He finally resurfaced in Damron’s life this week, after a couple who had been feeding him took him to the SPCA. The connection: a microchip that Damron’s vet installed in Dagney years ago. It contained her contact information.

Nobody keeps track of how many pets have recovery microchips, but Adam Goldfarb of the Humane Society of the United States said, “We’re seeing a lot of growth, and we’re going to see a lot more.” The SPCA of Wake County installs microchips in 2,200 pets a year and scans every stray it receives for a silicon clue of ownership.

Damron said Dagney’s microchip gave her hope that she would be reunited with her cat, even as she moved on with her life. She has children, ages 3 and 1, that her cat has never met.

Tears appeared in her eyes Wednesday as she touched Damron’s fur again. She talked about his toughness and admired his healthy build.

“I was afraid he was going to be skinny,” she said. “He’s not.”

After awhile, Damron picked up Dagney and put him in a blue pet carrier. They were headed to the “V-E-T,” she said, and then back back home for a quiet party that would include a healthy portion of giblets for him.

Welcome back, Dagney, to the life of a house cat. You’ll never go outside again.

For nine agonizing minutes, Gresham resident Barbara Belgrave struggled to breathe while trapped on the second story of her burning house until Gresham firefighters rescued her early Sunday, July 15.

“I didn’t think I was gonna make it, to be totally honest,” said Barbara, 51, over a cellular phone the day after flames destroyed her house and nearly killed her.

Barbara was sound asleep in her upstairs bedroom in the 1300 block of Southwest Walters Drive when her 12-pound cat, Cheba, pounced on her at 4:39 a.m.

Cheba has a bad habit of jumping on the bed and startling Barbara in the middle of the night, so she installed a baby gate in her bedroom door to prevent such rude awakenings.

But early Sunday, Barbara woke to the thud of Cheba jumping on her.

“She knew something was wrong,” Barbara said. “I really think that God worked through her.”

Thick smoke had filled the bedroom. Barbara closed the bedroom door and went to let some fresh air in through a window.

“In front of the house everything was lit up, just glowing,” she said. “I knew the house was on fire.”

She opened the window, but more smoke billowed in, so she slammed it shut. With her husband, Scott, away at work, Barbara weighed her options.

The woman has an imploded vertebra due to a car accident and uses a cane to get around.

“So I knew that if I jumped out the window, I’d break my back again for sure,” she said.

Grabbing the phone, she tried to call 9-1-1, but the line was dead.

Luckily, Barbara’s purse, containing her cellular phone, was in the bedroom.

What took place next is captured on a chilling, heart-stopping 9-1-1 tape.

Coughing, Barbara told the dispatcher that her house was on fire.

“It’s coming up through the floor,” Barbara said, referring to smoke floating up the air vents. “… I’m having trouble breathing. Everything’s getting black.”

Calmly, the dispatcher told Barbara to shove blankets under the bedroom door.

“I know that you’re trapped, you cannot get out of the window?” the dispatcher asked.

“I have a broken back,” Barbara explained.

The dispatcher told her to lay on the floor.

“Please hurry,” Barbara pleaded. “I can’t hardly breathe.”

She heard glass popping and household items breaking around her. Also, she heard her cat, which she’d trapped in the bedroom with her when she closed the bedroom door. The animal, too, struggled for breath.

The dispatcher reassured Barbara that firefighters were on the way and told her to breathe through a cloth, like a T-shirt. Barbara had already gripped her bed sheet over her mouth, hoping it would act as some sort of smoke filter.

“Oh please hurry,” Barbara moaned, panic creeping into her voice.

The lights went out and the sound of breaking glass grew closer. Barbara felt the floor radiating heat.

“I hear all kinds of things breaking, I’m so scared,” she cried.

Hot smoke seared her lungs and burned her eyes.

Barbara and the dispatcher talked about maybe moving toward the back of the house, where a police officer was standing by.

“The door’s hot,” Barbara said, touching her closed bedroom door. “I better not open it, I’m too afraid.”

“OK, good choice,” the dispatcher assured her.

Knowing firefighters were on the way, Barbara moved to the window but only saw flames. Although she told the dispatcher where she was – her window was the one above the first garage – Barbara opened the shades so firefighters would know what window to go to.

Then she scrambled back to the floor in the hopes of finding more oxygen.

Meanwhile, her cat came out of hiding and Barbara grabbed it.

“I can’t breathe,” she said just as firefighters pulled up. “I’ve got my cat right here, too. Please hurry.”

Per the firefighters’ instructions relayed through the dispatcher, Barbara went to the window.

“They’re coming to me now,” she said.

The tape picks up the sound of firefighters Peter Graves and Lt. Rick Sieverson banging on the window.

Barbara opened it.

“Come on ma’am,” one of the firefighters said,

“Take the cat,” Barbara replied, shoving Cheba into the man’s arms. Panicked, the cat jumped away and scurried off.

Barbara made it to fresh air and solid ground, where paramedics treated her by giving her oxygen.

She got out just in time.

“I think I had one or two minutes and that was it because I wasn’t hardly breathing at all when they finally got me out,” Barbara said.

Gresham Fire Inspector Robert Mottice said the electrical fire caused about $350,000 damage to the $400,000 house, and destroyed an estimated $150,000 in contents.

“It’s toast,” Barbara said, adding that what’s still standing will most likely be knocked down and rebuilt. The house is insured.

She said a faulty electrical strip that powered the home’s computer and associated electronics likely sparked the fire, which started in the house’s first-floor office, located below and next to the bedroom Barbara was trapped in.

Ironically, Barbara’s husband works as an industrial electrician.

The two are staying with his parents in North Portland. It will take at least six months for them to rebuild their home, but they plan to stay in Gresham.

On Monday, a day after the fire, Barbara’s eyes and lungs still burned. But she was counting her blessings and dubbed her rescue a miracle.

She talked about the “phenomenal” 9-1-1 dispatcher who helped her through it all.

“I’m hoping to meet her sometime,” Barbara said.

And she credited Gresham’s well-trained firefighters.

And she is indebted to her cat, which in another ironic twist, sparked a fire a month ago that caused $10,000 damage to the living room. Cheba knocked over an electric heat gun used in crafting, accidentally turning it on.

Barbara hopes to find the cat, a grey kitty with white paws and chest and is implanted with a microchip that can be used to locate its owners.

Meanwhile, Barbara is stopping by the ruins of her charred home and putting out cat food to draw Cheba from out of hiding.

“She’s out there someplace, I just don’t know where yet,” Barbara said.

Liz Lerch loves cats, but not having to clean their mess out of a litter box, or spending hundreds of dollars on litter over the life of a cat.

So when she got two 4-month-old kittens from a shelter, she vowed to train them to use the toilet in her Lombard home.

Following advice from the book, “How to Toilet Train Your Cat,’’ Lerch put cardboard over the toilet, then a plastic planter holder with a hole in the middle of the bottom, filled with litter. She gradually removed the litter and widened the hole, until there was no litter and the hole was as big as the bowl.

Each time cats Carl and Stewie used the potty, she gave them positive reinforcement — praise, petting, play or food.

There were mishaps of course, but those were blamed on an unfortunate bout of irritable bowel syndrome.

After nine months of practice, the cats now use the toilet on their own and seem perfectly happy. And, yes, humans use that toilet too.

Some visitors, like a guy who worked on Lerch’s garage door, are a little freaked out by her cats’ routine, but most of her friends had a positive reaction.

“My friends all want to see it happen,’’ she said. “They think it’s cool, and want to know why nobody toilet trained their cats.’’

Not a new idea

Toilet training cats is not new. Jazz musician Charles Mingus wrote publicly about training his cat decades ago. The practice got more recent boosts from a toilet-trained Jinx in the movie “Meet the Parents’’ and coverage at online sites like Craigslist or karawynn.net.

Cat owners can buy kits from outfits like CitiKitty.com, which sells toilet-training covers for cats. Some owners even train their cats to flush by putting a toy on the handle.

Lerch’s cats get wet sometimes splashing the water with their paws, but they’ve never fallen in.

Still, not everyone is jumping on the toilet-training bandwagon. Some people don’t want to share a toilet with a cat or find their unflushed presents.

What about instincts?

Others, like Betsy Lipscomb, who sells cat supplies and writes the online advice site Cats International, say cats need litter to meet their instincts to dig and cover their waste. She cited cat owners who’ve tried toilet training and ended up with soiled carpets.

“Some people want to make their pets into little people with furry coats,’’ she said. “It’s going to backfire when you can’t satisfy the cat’s natural instincts.’’

Before Liz Lerch had success with Carl and Stewie, she learned through experience that some cats just won’t go without litter.

She previously tried potty-training her cat Springsteen, but when she tried to take out the litter, he drew a line in the clay sand.

“He would meow and walk up and down and look at it and act like he had to go,’’ Lerch said. “He’d look at you like, ‘I gotta go but there’s nowhere to go and you took my stuff.’”

She kept flushable litter in the box, but eventually that became more hassle than it was worth to clean.

“When you step out of the shower and into cat litter all over the floor, it’s not the most pleasant thing,’’ she said.

Ultimately, she gave in and let her cat return to the traditional litter box, figuring he was set in his ways at age 10.

American Humane Association training manager Karen Spaulding said her group has no stance on the issue, encouraging what works for both owner and kitty.

“I had a friend that did it beautifully and never had a problem,’’ she said, “but you might need the right cat and the right situation.’’

Two Rottweilers and a cat in the same room is hardly a recipe for a happy home.

But Sky and her tiny charges are a proud mum and pups with a difference. For this almost unidentifiable bundle of fur is a rather special family unit and is set to take many people by surprise.

A litter of six puppies were rejected by their mum Roxy straight after being born on Monday, leaving them in a precarious position.

Owner David Page quickly made the decision to do what he could to save the lives of the tiny pups.

“They were born at my property in Haddiscoe near Beccles and the mum instantly refused to look after them for whatever reason, I think she may have been stressed by the birth,” said Mr Page.

“I was worried of course, so I dried the puppies off and put them in my car, got them under the heater and drove them back to North Walsham, where I live.

“I was really hoping for the best, I took them to the vets where they had a good look and got them on antibiotics. We have lost several of them to pneumonia unfortunately.

“When I got home I sat down to have a think about what to do next and decided to have a go with Sky.

“I put the four which were still alive at that stage in her box very gently, one by one alongside the kittens Sky has also got with her at the moment - just to see what happened.

“They snuggled into her straight away.”

Mr Page is feeding the puppies on a combination of Sky’s milk and special puppy formula milk from the vet. Now two more of the puppies have died, but the future of those which remain looks to be in good paws.

“It is very much fingers crossed now, but they all seem happy and it’s going well,” said Mr Page.

“Obviously it’s very unusual, people always talk about how ‘they fight like cat and dog’, but in this case I’m hoping they will grow up to be the best of friends.

“I am intending to keep them all and I imagine when they are all older they will all get on very well.”

And Mr Page’s wife Joanne said: “We will be trying to get some milk from Roxy as well, as it will help the pups build up their resistance to illness.

“But we can’t leave them together, we will just have to do our best.”

The situation has at least one exact precedent, with an almost identical case in America reported earlier in the year.

In February it was reported that in Connecticut workers at an animal charity used a cat which had recently had kittens to adopt a six-day-old Rottweiler puppy that was rejected by its mother.

The puppy, named Charlie, was nursed alongside a number of kittens born to a cat called Satin.

Ike, the 3-year-old gray Maine Coon cat that hitched a 600-mile ride from Oak Ridge to central Florida, has been reunited with his owner.

“He waltzed right on up to us,” owner Ashley Gaines said in a phone interview Friday from her Beverly Hills, Fla., hotel room. “He just walked up all leisurely, and I thought, ‘Why aren’t you running?’ ”

Ike inadvertently ended up in Citrus County, Fla., on July 7 after his curiosity over a Tennessee neighbor’s open moving truck got the best of him.

Unbeknownst to the neighbors, he headed south with them. He gave them a start when he bolted out of the back at journey’s end.

When Gaines learned of Ike’s escapade, she got emergency leave from her downtown Knoxville employer and she and her mother traveled 10 hours to search for the beloved animal.

Gaines posted fliers, pleaded for assistance from local media outlets and spoke with nearly everyone in the area.

Her first tip came Wednesday when a parcel deliverywoman notified the search party she’d spotted a cat that fit Ike’s description. Gaines said the good news rejuvenated her spirits, which were admittedly dwindling considering her cat was in an area populated with coyotes.

“I was beginning to think we wouldn’t find him,” she said. “But she gave us a few street names to search.”

Buoyed by a story in the Citrus County Chronicle newspaper and an outpouring of community support, Gaines and her mother zeroed in on the targeted streets.

What they found were numerous households that left food out for stray cats, including several gray ones, increasing their optimism.

“He really landed in the best possible place to get lost,” Gaines said.

The most promising lead came Thursday afternoon from a neighborhood handyman who heard her calls for Ike.

Around 10:15 p.m. Thursday, Gaines returned to the man’s home to see if anything had developed. While she spoke with the man, Ike strolled onto the driveway and right up to her.

Gaines said she plans on taking the cat to a vet so he can get a GPS tracking collar. She doesn’t plan on letting him outside until then. Ironically, she added that once they were back at her Florida hotel, Ike was meowing to go outside.

After an interview with a Florida news station this morning, Gaines, her mother and the pet will head back to Oak Ridge to await the return of another family member away from home. Gaines’ husband, Thomas, is a lieutenant in the U.S. Army three months from completing a 15-month tour in Iraq.

While Gaines said Ike is her companion while her husband is deployed, Thomas Gaines offered a further glimpse into just how much the four-legged family member means to her.

In an e-mail message, he said they picked out the Maine Coon, a breed commonly regarded for its hefty size, because he’s a dog person. He joked that he envisioned growing the cat to a size large enough to ride, but when Ike peaked at around 10 pounds, Thomas Gaines resorted to treating the bushy-tailed cat more like a child than a mode of transportation.

“When I first deployed, he was there as a replacement for affection during her first lonely nights,” Thomas Gaines wrote. “When Ashley learned that I and several members of my platoon had been injured, Ike noticed her distress and spent more time curled up next to her.

“Ashley has been forced to cope with so many things this past year alone, and now the one thing she did have had been taken away from her. There really was no other course of action that she could have taken than to go down to Florida to look for Ike.

“Because, in the end, she was not looking for Ike, she’s looking for me.”

As La Cañadan residents, Shannon Griffin and Jennifer Barke enjoyed a walk down one of the bridle paths near the 4200 block of Oakwood Avenue early Monday morning, when they heard the lone cry of a tiny kitten.

They discovered that the small “meow” was coming from a grey striped kitten stuck in a the top of a very tall tree.

Paul and Wendy Wyatt, who live next door to the bridle path and the tree, came to the rescue of the kitten.

The Wyatts had called the Los Angeles County Fire Department and were advised that a nearby station would be informed of the kitten’s dilemma and the captain would then decide if they wanted to send a truck out.

“It wasn’t normal policy [to send a truck out],” Paul said.

The Wyatts also called the Pasadena Humane Society and were instructed to place food and water at the bottom of the tree.

That ploy did not work on the little kitten because by the next morning it had climbed higher into the tree’s branches.

In the meantime, Griffin and Barke continued the walk around the neighborhood and met who turned out to be some Good Samaritans.

“We ran smack into these guys,” Griffin said.

The “guys” were workman with Pouk and Steinle Electrical Construction out of Riverside. They were on a job nearby and had an Ariel bucket truck, which was more than capable of reaching the stranded stray.

The four workers — Terry Poloncak, Ruben Rangel, Mike Paraska and foreman Mike Wagnon — didn’t hesitate to help.

They drove their truck over to the next block, near the tree. Paraska took the bucket up into the branches. At that time the Los Angeles County Fire Department, Station 82, drove up.

By that time, however, the workman had things well in hand.

Paraska brought the frightened feline back down to solid ground and into the gloved hands of Wagnon.

The LACFD stayed around until they were certain the kitten was safe.

Wagnon held the kitten tight, as it decided if it was more afraid of the tall tree than the crowd of people now encircling it.

Wagnon made certain that the little creature was not injured. The elated feeling of rescue soon came to the awkward feeling of who will now care for the orphaned kittened.

That question was quickly settled when Paraska, one of the rescuers, volunteered to take the kitten home as a birthday present for his wife.

“I called her to see if she received the flowers that I sent her, and then told her I had another surprise,” Paraska said.

Wendy Wyatt went to her home to retrieve a cat carrier and Paul held the kitten. After a few rather deep gouges into Paul’s hand, the little kitten was placed into the carrier and handed over to new Paraska, the new pet parent.

As the kitten and the workers got into the trucks and Paul went off to get some first aid crème for the kitty cuts, Griffin and Barke were pleased at the fact that they had all worked together to rescue the poor little creature.

“That’s just the type of community we live in,” they both said. “That’s why we love it here.”

By all accounts, Tahoe is a typical kitten: cute, sleepy and hungry. But his eating habits are far from typical, as the stray’s been nursing from a 3-year-old dog named Lillie.

Ever since the kitten was found under the hood of Eunice Collins’ running Chevrolet Tahoe a few weeks ago, he’s been feeding from the unusually cooperative longhaired dachshund. Tahoe feeds in the morning, at night and after naps, purring and pawing at the dog’s belly.

“That’s not going to happen very often,” said veterinarian John Beck, who added that the “kitten got lucky, basically” that he found a dog with those maternal instincts.

Collins said she was confused by the sound of a kitten meowing as she drove her Tahoe.

“I thought I was going crazy,” Collins said. “I came to a light and heard it again. So I pulled into a gas station.”

Collins took the kitten in and kept him in a bedroom. Four days later, she saw Lillie feeding him.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “She has just taken Tahoe on as her baby and has been nurturing and taking care of him. They’re just very close.”

Beck said having Tahoe in the house “induced a false pregnancy, a nursing response.”

“It made the hormones needed to produce milk,” Beck said. “Now, I’m sure the cat obviously had it in mind the dog was (his) mother.”

From Persians to Siamese, Bengals to Burmese, the cats of the world come in all shapes and sizes. But the ancestry of every one can be traced to the same incredibly specific source, say scientists. All domestic felines are descended from a group of around five in the Middle East around 130,000 years ago, a study suggests.

The findings overturn the traditional view that the first domestic cats were tamed by the Ancient Egyptians just 4,000 years ago. Instead, they were bred thousands of years earlier by farmers in Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilisation, it is claimed. Researchers have traced the domestic feline family tree back to a small family of wild cats living on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates in modern-day Iraq.

They also found that the closest living relative of the pet cat is the Near Eastern wildcat - a shy and rare creature which resembles a large tabby.

He added, “However, we do not know exactly when cats were domesticated, although it is likely to have been around 10,000 years ago when other animals like cattle and goats were domesticated.” Aside from accidental cross-breeding, domestic cats are not closely related to the wildcats of Europe, Central Asia and Southern Africa, the team found. But their DNA is closely related to the Near Eastern wildcat. The tests showed that the ancestors of domestic cats broke away with their wilder cousins up to 130,000 years ago.

Dr Kitchener said the findings were supported by the discovery of a cat skeleton apparently buried with its owner in Cyprus 9,500 years ago. At the time it was found, three years ago, it was not clear whether the animal had been domesticated or was a Near Eastern wildcat.

The experts believe cats originally sought out human company, attracted by rodents infesting the first agricultural settlements. These early farmers would have found the animals extremely useful for protecting their grain stores.

Although the first domestic cats appeared in Mesopotamia, it was the Egyptians who turned them from a working animal into a pet, creating a cult which was passed on to the Romans and exported around the world.

Although the domestication of the cat has been pushed back thousands of years, it still took place long after dogs were tamed.

Scientists believe the first wolves and wild dogs began to live alongside hunters around 100,000 years ago.

At first the creatures lived outside travelling camps, scavenging off kills and providing a useful alarm system for the hunters.

There’s nothing like a mother’s love, even in the animal kingdom.

3 year-old Muffey, a Shih-Tzu in North County, has taken on the role of mother to four nursing kittens.

The mama cat died of heart failure two weeks after giving birth and Muffey took over.

Muffey had a litter of pups a couple years ago and evidently likes being a mom.

Her owner says the pooch won’t let the 2-month-old kittens out of her sight.

A cat whose owners thought was lost spent nearly three weeks crossing the Pacific Ocean in a shipping container with no food or water and appears to be just fine.

The voyage began after Pamela Escamilla lost sight of her 3-year-old calico, Spice, while packing a huge container with household goods in Waikoloa Village, Hawaii.

The container was shipped June 15 to Southern California. Escamilla, 39, and her husband couldn’t find the cat before taking their flight and asked neighbors in Hawaii to call if Spice returned.

While the Escamillas feared the worst, Spice spent 18 days in the pitch-black container without food or water as it crossed the Pacific before arriving at the San Bernardino home of Escamilla’s parents on Tuesday.

“We really thought that cat was going to be dead,” said Edward Gardner, Escamilla’s father.

When Escamilla opened the container, she and family members huddled around her noticed fluffs of cat hair on the floor.

They started removing items, and Escamilla climbed into the container to search.

“I saw (Spice) poke her head out from behind some bicycles, and I started to scream,” said Escamilla. She gently picked up the cat and went to the veterinarian, who said the feline’s prognosis was good.

“It’s always a good day when the cat’s alive,” said Escamilla. “We didn’t know what we would find.”

Spice’s kidneys had shrunk and her bowels were backed up, but she managed to get some food and water down at the vet, Escamilla said.

The vet gave the Escamillas a soup recipe for Spice made of chicken broth and marrow.

“(The vet) said, ‘That’s a calico for you,”‘ Escamilla said. “They have a survival instinct.”