Emily the cat is back after flying home in the lap of luxury. The curious cat who wound up traveling to France in a cargo container touched down at the Milwaukee airport on Thursday, greeted by her family and a horde of reporters.
A Continental cargo agent handed her over to 9-year-old Nick
Herndon, 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.
Her sumptuous return in business class on a Continental Airlines flight was a sharp departure from her trip to France where she 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 her Appleton home in late September. She
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.