MY NEIGHBOR HAS BEEN FEEDING MY CAT AND THE CAT NOW GOES TO HER HOUSE INSTEAD OF MINE

My cat started disappearing.

At first, I wasn’t worried.

She’s an indoor-outdoor cat and sometimes wanders around the neighborhood.

But gradually, she stayed away longer.

Then she stopped coming home at night.

I found out where she was going.

My neighbor.

I noticed my cat sitting in her window one afternoon.

I knocked on the door.

My neighbor smiled and said:

“She loves coming here.”

I asked if she’d been feeding her.

She said occasionally.

I asked her to stop.

She agreed.

But my cat continued going there.

Then I noticed something.

She was gaining weight.

She had also started refusing the food I normally gave her.

I confronted my neighbor again.

She insisted she wasn’t feeding her regularly.

So I put a small tracker on my cat’s collar.

The data showed that my cat was spending several hours at the neighbor’s house every day.

I checked from a distance.

My neighbor was giving her treats.

Then she started letting her inside.

I asked her directly to stop.

She became defensive.

She said my cat clearly preferred her house.

That wasn’t the point.

I didn’t want my cat being fed by someone else.

Then something strange happened.

My cat stopped coming home altogether.

I knocked on my neighbor’s door.

She claimed the cat had simply chosen to stay there.

I told her to let my cat go.

She refused.

She said:

“You can’t force an animal to live somewhere it doesn’t want to.”

That was when I realized this had become deliberate.

I contacted animal control and provided proof that the cat was mine.

My neighbor finally handed her over.

But there was a hidden clue I hadn’t noticed.

My cat had been wearing a collar with my phone number.

My neighbor had removed it.

She had replaced it with a decorative collar without contact information.

That meant she hadn’t simply been feeding my cat.

She had been making it harder for anyone to identify where the cat belonged.

I asked why.

She admitted she had become attached to my cat.

She said she believed my cat would eventually “choose” her permanently.

I changed my cat’s routine and stopped letting her roam freely.

My neighbor still occasionally complains that I’m being unfair.

But I don’t see it that way.

Animals can love more than one person.

That doesn’t mean someone gets to quietly make your pet dependent on them and then call it the animal’s choice.