Originally Posted by su2009
(Post 1113869)
My Siamese cat was taken from my lanai on January 15, 2015 sometime between 9:30 p.m., when I saw him in his cat bed, and 4:30 a.m when I got up. We have a cat door from the inside to the lanai and this cat usually went out onto the lanai once or twice during the night just to watch the golf course.
Although I did not realize it at the time, that night the screen door to the outside was not loose and not latched (ours has to be pulled tight to latch). I had not remembered to check the outside screen door before going to bed. The night was cold and raining, and my cat hated the rain and would not have gone out in it. He also would not have gotten lost; he liked people and walked up and down the block when he was young, and all the neighbors knew him. When I got up at 4:30 a.m. the next morning, my Siamese cat was gone, there was a dog-sized muddy footprint on the lanai, and the other cat then refused to go out through the cat door onto the lanai for three months after that, even if I was with him. Of course, now I am very careful to make sure the screen door is pulled tightly and latched when I go in or out.
On August 3, 2015, a neighbor three doors up called me at 1 p.m. in the afternoon to let me know that a coyote was making her way down the backyards of the houses on the Kenya golf course side of our street, Bramble Terrace. As we spoke on the phone, the coyote arrived in our backyard. It was a young female, and she came up onto our patio in the daylight and stared into our lanai. She then sniffed carefully around the lanai and through the bushes in the back and on the side of our house before moving down to the next neighbors' house. It was raining that day, but coyotes have a very oily coat and she did not look even slightly wet – her ears were up and her bushy tail was full and not bedraggled at all.
She was clearly alert and hunting for prey, and she searched carefully through the bushes behind the other houses on the golf course. I have no idea whether she was the coyote who took our cat, but she certainly found our lanai a place of interest, and coyotes are unquestionably smart enough to work open a poorly latched screen door.
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