June 18, 2026, 6:42 pm | Read time: 3 minutes
Some cases are so bizarre that they’re hard to believe: A cat has an internet contract with Vodafone, people walk robot dogs, or a cat is shipped across the country in an Amazon return. The latter happened to a cat in the U.S. in April.
Imagine your cat suddenly disappears without a trace. The search is unsuccessful until days later, the phone rings. “The animal has been found,” it says—in California, 1,000 kilometers away. How the cat got there is so curious that the case is currently making the rounds.
Cat Sneaks into Amazon Return Package
Carrie Clark lives with her family and cat, Galena, in Utah, USA. Occasionally, she orders from Amazon and also returns products. On April 10, 2024, while preparing a return, she doesn’t notice her cat sneaking into the box. She seals the package and sends it back to Amazon.
Shortly after, Carrie Clark notices her cat is missing. Family and friends search everywhere, post flyers in the neighborhood, share on social media, and ask neighbors. Galena, who is actually an indoor cat and doesn’t go outside, remains missing.
She can’t be found because Galena, along with the returned products, has traveled from Utah, through Nevada, to Los Angeles, California, in the return package.
At the online retailer’s return center, the package is opened six days later by an employee named Brandy. She finds the cat exhausted and dehydrated, cares for her, and takes her to a veterinarian the next day. The vet scans the microchip and identifies the owner. Carrie Clark receives a text message, which is automatically sent to the registered phone number when the chip is scanned. Shortly after, the vet calls to finally clarify Galena’s whereabouts, as Clark reports to “KSL TV.”
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Six Days Without Food and Water
The veterinarian informs the owner by phone that her cat was found in the Amazon return package. She survived because there were several shoeboxes with work shoes in the box, and it had torn slightly during transit. This allowed air in, preventing the cat from suffocating. The temperatures were also very mild. However, due to the long journey without water and food, Galena was exhausted and needed to be nursed back to health by the vet.
After the call with the veterinarian, Carrie Clark and her husband immediately booked a flight to Los Angeles to pick up Galena and bring her home. “It was a great reunion!” said Clark. “Although Galena was thinner and slightly dehydrated, her blood values were completely normal, and she was completely uninjured!”
Amazon Sets Its Own Rule for Handling Returns
In the end, the cat also benefited from Amazon’s voluntary goal. Some retailers destroy returns in the U.S. on a relatively large scale; there is no destruction ban there. Others sell returns in so-called “bin stores”—sometimes unopened, so the packages may sit for days or weeks. This type of return and surplus management is a huge trend in the U.S., as retailers need to get rid of returned products somehow. In 2022 alone, U.S. consumers returned goods worth more than $800 billion, and in 2023, it was $743 billion.
Amazon also tries to resell returns or otherwise put them back into circulation. The company has imposed a rule on itself not to destroy returns anymore. “Our mission is to give returned goods a second life,” Amazon states. For this reason, returns usually need to be inspected promptly, which likely saved the cat’s life in this case.