Cat nav keeping tabs on three-legged pet

Steve and Claire Thorn have invested in a hi-tech solution to keep Benjie, a six-year-old ginger and white Tom, from straying.

The marauding moggy lost his right back leg after becoming trapped in a garage door near the couple’s former home in Bolton, but it hasn’t held him back.

Now the family is able to pinpoint his whereabouts in real time via the internet after he was electronically tagged with the GPS satellite tracking device.

The lightweight device is fastened around his collar and allows his worried owners to monitor his every move at any time of day using a computer or mobile device.

Mr Thorn, who lives in a hamlet on high moorland, near Huddersfield, said: “Benjie definitely has a knack for getting into unusual places.

“After he lost his leg, he even managed to get stuck in a roof when it was being plastered. We could hear him crying and the plaster had to be smashed to rescue him.

“Our new house is surrounded by a lot of fields and Benjie wandered off twice last year. He went missing at the end of October and was found a week and a half later, then three weeks later he went missing again and was found nearly two miles away.”

Benjie’s latest disappearance was on November 22. There were no sightings of the runaway pet until an appeal helped find him a few weeks later.

The couple’s GPS tracking device includes a collar costing £140 and the monitoring system was another £60 for 12 months. It allows them to plot a map of where he has been.

Mr Thorn added: “He seems to stick to a half-mile radius around where we live, but he does take some bizarre routes and goes further than we would have expected. We have three other cats, including Benjie’s sister Poppy, who never go very far.”