Paws for thought

Kitty Pants — a pampered Seal Point Himalayan whose MySpace page reveals a penchant for mathematics and playing Candy Land with his parents, Jim and Amy Roach — spent roughly nine days at Burbank Animal Shelter as resident No. A025524.

In the months following Kitty Pants’ stay at the shelter from March 8 through March 18, a rash of e-mails, breathless news coverage and the efforts of Burbank’s finest have so far proved fruitless. As have a $650 reward and the $1,000 the couple spent on a private investigator and blanketing the area around their Manning Street home with fliers.

The Roaches just want their Kitty Pants back. The problem: He’s been legally adopted by another family.

“We were doing all the right things, and the problem is we don’t have our cat,” said Amy Roach. “The solution is for the city to stand up for its residents.”

Long before the uproar began, Kitty Pants on Feb. 16 slipped past a house sitter and into the cold world outside. Later that day he was reported as a lost Persian to the Burbank Animal Shelter, said Sgt. Thor Merich, the shelter’s acting superintendent.

After being scooped up by a neighbor on March 7, Kitty Pants was dropped off at the shelter’s after-hours cages, where he was retrieved the next day by a kennel attendant.

The attendant failed to check the lost pets book, a state-mandated log, authorities said.

Two days after Kitty Pants entered the shelter without identification tags or a microchip, the mother of the young woman who found the cat called the shelter and informed operators that she came across a wanted handbill posted in the neighborhood.

“She didn’t have the wanted poster in her possession, but she noted that there was a reward for the cat so she wanted us to document her name in case the owners do recover the cat,” Merich said. “At that time, another animal shelter employee did check the lost book to see if the cat that we had recovered matched any cat in the lost book. She did not find a match. That was because the cat noted in the lost book was a Persian. The cat we recovered was a Himalayan.”

Ten days after arriving at the shelter, Kitty Pants was adopted by another family.

“We made several phone calls to the new owners and asked if they would return the cat,” Merich said.