It is a very good thing to donate to the charity of your choice. But unless that charity is looking for a furry friend, it’s best to check all donated items for the presence of your cat, especially if he has an affinity for hiding in places like say, that old couch you don’t want anymore.

A couple in England was worried when their cat Crockett went missing, right around the time they’d donated a couch to a local charity shop, reports The Daily Mail. He had been gone for five days without a trace, something that wasn’t like him, his owners say.

“We noticed Crockett was missing straight away but could not think where he might have gone,” the woman explained. “He doesn’t go anywhere so I was really worried.”

It wasn’t until the sofa’s new owners heard meowing inside the couch, days after it’d been picked up, taken to the shop to sit for a few days and resold, that Crockett’s presence was discovered.

The manager for the charity shop says it was a shock to hear a couch-and-cat-combo had been sold to customers.

“I couldn’t believe what I was told when a customer phoned to say that they had bought a sofa from our shop and that they were delighted with the purchase except for the fact it had a cat inside,” she said.

Crockett’s family thinks he crawled in when the couch was taken apart so it could be moved out of his owners’ house, making it a bit tricky to get him out again.

“In order to release the cat they had to rip the material under the sofa as Crockett had lodged himself well into the back,” the manager said.

Crockett’s accidental owners calmed him down, fed him and then called the shop to reunite him with his people. Then everyone gathered round to listen to the tale of Crockett’s Travels And The Evil, Cat-Eating Couch.

‘We gave our sofa to a charity shop – with our missing CAT hiding in it’ [Daily Mail]

Follow MBQ on Twitter to see if her cat ever gets stuck in a couch or just stuck on top of the refrigerator, again: @marybethquirk

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