Family Brings Cat Inside — Then Realizes She's Already There

Maia has been with her family since she was a kitten. She has always been incredibly sweet and mellow and mostly just goes with the flow. 

“Maia is a really, really lovely cat,” Nieves Morán, one of Maia’s family members, told The Dodo. “She loves to bring us her toys so we can play with her.” 

While Maia is mostly an indoor cat, she sometimes likes to spend time outside in her family’s yard. One day, the door to the yard was open, and Morán’s dad noticed that Maia was wandering around outside. After a bit she came inside and snuggled up next to him, and he didn’t think anything of it. 

A little while later, Morán’s mom went into her room to ask her something and saw Maia curled up next to her. She then went into the living room — and was very confused to see Maia was curled up in there too. 

How could Maia be in two places at once? 

The family quickly realized that the cat in the living room wasn’t Maia at all, but a random cat who had wandered into the yard and decided he lived there now. 

Everyone was mystified as to where this random Maia look-alike had come from. It had been easy to mistake him for Maia because he was immediately so comfortable in the house and with the family. It was as if he’d lived there for years. When Maia noticed the new cat, she was just as unfazed, and the family had a feeling she and the cat had met already.

“Maia and the cat just smelled each other, they weren't scared or anything so I think they had seen each other before,” Morán said. 

They decided to call the new cat Jay, and went about trying to find out if he had a family who was looking for him. They posted online, put up fliers and got him scanned for a microchip. He wasn’t chipped and no one ever contacted them — so they decided to adopt him themselves. 

“After seeing that the cat was not wild at all, they decided that we were going to keep it, we cannot leave such a beautiful cat on the street,” Morán said. 

Since then, Jay has quickly become an irreplaceable member of the family. He and Morán’s dad are very close and spend lots of time cuddled up together, just like they did on that very first day. He’s also best friends with his cat sister Maia. His family is so glad that he wandered into their yard that day and that they mistook him for Maia.

It was the best case of mistaken identity there ever was.