A WOMAN whose cat has been missing since March has hired a ‘pet detective’ in her endless quest to find Poppy, her ‘feline child'.

Mamta Scally, of Poppleton, near York, who previously paid for two full page adverts in The Press as part of her desperate search for the Burmese cat, has also had almost 24,000 hits on a video appeal posted on a dedicated Facebook page for the animal, called Find Poppy.

The Press reported in March on Mamta’s desperation following the disappearance of Poppy, who had helped her cope with the sadness of childlessness.

She said that after struggling for years with infertility and losing a baby, she and her husband Paul had faced the devastating realisation the door to parenthood had closed on them.

“Poppy was a name we’d kept for a baby girl if we’d had one,” she said. “So when this little Burmese kitten arrived we called her Poppy.”

She said yesterday that after months of stress and anxiety about what had happened to the cat and setting up www.facebook.com/findpoppythecat, someone recommended she should hire pet detective Robert Kenny, of Happy Tails Detective.

“He is a qualified animal search detective with vast experience spanning over a decade and you can see for yourself from the website his successes,” she said.

“He’s also worked on a number of high profile cases.

“Following his assessment of Poppy’s disappearance two weeks ago, his conclusion is that she has been removed from the village in a vehicle - most likely stolen or inadvertently transported, as opposed to having been run over.

“He even believes she’d be no more than 10-12 miles radius from where she went missing.”

She said that on his advice, she was now working on raising Poppy’s profile again, asking the public if they or someone they knew had acquired a Chocolate Burmese recently fitting Poppy’s description.

“If they have, I urge them to have her scanned at the vets, as they have a cat that does not belong to them.”

She added that a petition to make pet theft a crime in its own right was recently taken to Parliament after raising more than 100,000 signatures.

Mr Kenny said Happy Tails Detective was the UK and Europe’s only certified pet detective agency whose team was qualified in the recovery of missing, lost and stolen cats and dogs.

“Since 2007, we have solved over 4,300 lost pet cases and our recovery rate of 68 per cent speaks volumes for specialised techniques and excellent training,” he said.

He said that after pets had been missing for six months or more, they were harder to locate than just after their disappearance, but could still be found.