The world awaits word on George

Frank Walburg regretted breaking off again from our conversation about his long, long-lost cat, but his phone wouldn't stop ringing.

"That was the Bonnie Hunt Show," he said Wednesday as we resumed our follow-up on George, the cat whose microchip brought him home after a marathon absence of 13½ years.

Since the story of George's return ran on Tuesday, the "Today Show" has offered to fly Frank and his wife, Melinda Merlin, and George to New York for a live national TV appearance. By Wednesday afternoon, the couple had fielded 24 requests for media interviews.

Most they politely declined because George, while improving, is still weak, ill and dreadfully thin. Frank said George perked up noticeably after a vet diagnosed a parasitic infection and started him on medicine Tuesday.

As wondrous as it is that George is back home after so long -- he apparently was kept all those years by a woman on Santa Rosa Avenue who called him Puka -- Frank said the real story is the cheap, tiny technology that made his return possible.

"A microchip brought us back together again," he said.

Microchips for pets were a new technology when Frank and Melinda had a rice-grain-sized chip implanted in the skin of George and three sibling kittens in 1992. Vets and shelters have scanners that detect the chips and read the identifying information imbedded in them.

After the owner of a Santa Rosa Avenue mobile home park trapped an emaciated old cat last week, a staffer at the Sonoma County animal shelter scanned him.

The employee found an old AVID (American Veterinary Identification Devices) chip in the cat's skin and traced it to Santa Rosa's Northtown Animal Hospital. A staffer there found the chip that was placed 16 years ago in a cat owned by Frank and Melinda, and phoned them.

"This is a monstrously lucky set of occurrences," Frank said. Had his weak, starving old cat not had a chip in him when he arrived at the shelter last week, "he would have been euthanized within a day, maybe two."

Mary Metzner, a longtime employee of AVID, said from St. Louis on Wednesday that more than 25 million of the company's chips have been placed in pets, and every day they allow lost animals to be returned to their families.

Mary had read George's story on the Internet. "It's a miracle," she said. She believes this is a first for a chip-embedded lost cat to be brought back home after almost 14 years.

I phoned two local vets to ask what it costs to have a microchip placed in a pet. One said $31, the other $43.60.

Frank and Melinda will tell you it's the bargain of a lifetime, or nine.

GUY AND MARCY, the approachable Sonoma County celebs who tout food and friendship on a syndicated weekly radio show, will dine in Santa Rosa on Tuesday. They invite us to join them.

Guy Fieri and Marcy Smothers will be at Guy's Johnny Garlic's restaurant on Nov. 18 to eat and raise money for state-of-the-art new diagnostic equipment for the Women's Health Center. They'll donate a share of each dinner tab to the quest for a new breast MRI.

Guy and Marcy and a corps of breast-cancer warriors (www.tmcposse.com) do request reservations. Anyone who's followed Marcy's radio career knows that fighting breast cancer is something she takes seriously.

Remember when she had mammograms performed on herself live on her talk show on KSRO?

Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.