An adventurous Alpharetta area cat is up for what has to be the most prestigious award in the world of pet insurance claims.
Nationwide insurance says Minnow the cat missing for three weeks from her home near Alpharetta is one of the most unusual pet insurance claims of the year.
Minnow is one of five animals in the running for the agency’s annual Hambone Award, named after a dog who ate an entire Thanksgiving ham while stuck in a refrigerator. If a pet wins, the medical facility that helped them gets up to $10,000.
Minnow’s case is remarkable not only for what happened —coming back after 3 weeks with a broken rib and having lost a third of her body weight — but how she came back.
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Andrea Brannen, 55, said Minnow was used to being outdoors when she rescued the short-hair brown tabby in South Carolina in 2016.
But when Brannen moved to southern Forsyth County, she tried keeping Minnow indoors more often. But cats will be cats.
“She’d start venturing out further, and then one day she didn’t come back. And that was scary,” Brannen said.
Like many pets, Minnow is more than a cat.
Brannen and her late husband had made an unplanned visit to an animal shelter, and she was drawn to Minnow. But they left that day without adopting her.
She regretted it and called back the next day only to be told that Minnow had been adopted. It turns out her husband was the one who had returned and gotten Minnow.
Her husband, Graham, died before she moved here with Minnow in spring 2018.
When Minnow went missing, Brannen said she put up flyers all around town and even left her litter box outside to lure her.
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After three weeks with no Minnow, Brannen was ready to give up. As she drove home from work one day, she started talking to her late husband.
She remembered saying: “All right, Graham. You brought Minnow home the first time. Now I need you to bring her home again.”
The next day, Brannen was taking out the trash when Minnow appeared at the back door.
A trip to a vet to treat the cat’s injuries led to a nearly $2,000 claim to Nationwide, she said. Now the cat joins four other finalists for the Hambone Award.
If Minnow wins first place, $10,000 will go to Midway Animal Hospital in southern Forsyth County.
Second place pet gets $7,000, third is $5,000 and the two other clinics that treated the finalist pets get $4,000.
Nationwide say it has 750,000 insured pets. Nationwide spokewoman Lindsey Zivoder said a team combed through the 1.5 million claims from last year to find the Hambone finalists.
As described by Nationwide, the four other finalists are:
• Tippy, the athletic Border Collie mix from Arroyo Grande, California barreled into a steel trailer hitch while playing fetch and injured her snout.
• Jasper, the cat from Leander, Texas was treated for heat exposure after narrowly escaping a dryer disaster when he got stuck in the fluff cycle.
• Frank, the Rottweiler from Keyport, New Jersey found himself sniffing a porcupine that left quills up his snout.
• Max, the Great Pyrenees from San Marcos, Texas who got his head stuck in a wild hog trap.
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