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I would've taken it to a vet. Although, I usually won't deal with strays without collars hands on, and I definitely don't go near stray animals that aren't coming to my door. Too many close calls with rabies in my area.
But yeh, take him to a vet and get him checked up for health reasons and to see if he has a microchip.
For everyone else, DEFINITELY put collars on you animals. We had a farm cat that went hunting, and he came back and his shoulder was shot out. People in the country love to shoot at cats and dogs, and I'm hoping that they'd at least restrain themselves if the animals had collars and therefore, obvious owners. Our cat lived, but it was really sad to see him like that while it healed. We should've had a collar on him for sure.
Also, he is a lover, and even though we would've missed him, I would've been ok if someone like you had taken him in and given him an indoor home! :)
I know, I should have kept him. Might go back up there. It's just hard to decide. Three other times I have taken cats to the vet and the owners got pissy, like, "He's an outdoor cat, I can't BELIEVE you went to all that trouble."
Take him to the vet to check if he has a chip and probably put some "Found" signs around the area where he was found to see if he is anyones.
@helenberrycrunch: Me too,
and
@ktbrady: can I have the french fry the kitty didn't want? I mean who turns down a french fry?
I would have done the same thing. Just take him to the vet tomorow to get checked out and put up flyers.
ETA: oh wait, did he go away. I would go look for him. I luffff furry kittys
take him home with you!! :) then put up found signs, contact vets in area, and put up a found post on craiglist and call it a day! love on him in the meantime! 
We had a stray show up at our home one year. Hung around for many days, waiting for us to open the garage in the mornings. Took him to the vet to be checked out and shots before letting him in to mingle with our cat, and asked around our small town repeatdly for a missing cat. Three months later we found a 'lost' poster. Turns out the family said they were so busy with camping and t-ball that summer they hadn't had time to look for him! Still see him roaming town now and then...kinda think if they were so busy to not care enough to look for him I should have just kept him! Oh well. Just my story ;) So yeah I'd say if you come across him again do the vet/poster route!
LOL. This sounds like something I would do. We have a lot of collarless cats in my neighborhood, but I usually know generally which house they belong to. I wish people would at least collar their cat (wish they'd keep them indoors, but I realize not all cats will be if they are tamed ferals).
I actually have taken a stray to the Humane Society before, but it was very obviously starving. I felt awful that I had waited so long to pick it up (it was hanging around our neighborhood), but it had a collar, and I didn't realize it was starving until I finally pet it one day. Skin and bones, poor thing. :(
ha i would soooooo take it home! and shame on people who dont have collars and tags on their pets... im just sayin... ya never know.... my dogs have wandered to the neighbors before... although all i have to do is call and they come home.... but some animals are just wanderers. :)
OK I went back and looked for him all around, but he is gone. I really think he is someone's pet bc he was very well fed and friendly. Just makes me nervous. I didn't want to bring him inside at first bc one of my two cats has a heart condition and is really susceptible to catching things, but now I kinda wish I had just smuggled him into the laundry room or something. Oh well. I'm sure he is home, I hope!
I feel like a bad cat owner. I have 2 out four collarless cats. They keep taking them off. My super friendly one is microchip. He's a little con artist he convinced a neighbor he was a stray (he a 18 pound massive fur ball ) and they were feeding him tuna. I thought it was odd he was disappering between 6-8 every day until i found tuna on his fur. i bought him another collar and his free lunch was gone.
@bluek: hahaha. That's the thing, sometimes these cats just pop their collars right off! It's hard to know who is supposed to be outside and who is just on an escapade (like my indoor cat likes to do)!
My cat has taken off every collar we have ever put on him. So yeah he wanders around the neighborhood without a collar (he's in indoor cat that likes to go on walks). Everyone in the neighborhood knows him though so we've never had an issue with someone picking him up.
If he was near a main road I would have taken him with me, too! I'd worry too much about him possibly getting hit by a car. It sounds like he was sweet and affectionate but that doesn't always mean he belongs to someone - there's this cat in my complex who acts like a dog - he's always running after people, meowing, totally happy to see them. He follows me around every time I see him and would probably let me pet him for hours if I had the time. FI eventually asked one of the apartment managers and she said he was abandoned by a renter like 7 years ago and he's lived there ever since, sleeping in different apartments. And I guess people leave food out for him, too. I never would have guessed it because he has beautiful fur and he's just so sweet. Although that's probably not the case with the cat you found, he probably has a good home and his owners just don't make him wear a collar. If you see him again you should snatch him and put up some posters!
Take him to the vet. See if he's chipped. Call vets in your area and ask if someone has reported him missing. Generally if people let their cats outside they make sure they have a collar on!
This happened to me and my college roommates seven years ago. We loved him and squeezed him and never let him go. He's purring on my husband's lap right now.
(In that case, we observed that he'd never been neutered, observed that he was covered in fleas and some very fat ticks, observed that he was unusually skinny, and took him to a vet who confirmed there was no microchip. We then commenced spending $1500 on vet bills when he reacted badly to getting neutered. He also doubled his body weight in his first few months with us. We figured that after that, he was ours.)
You might put an ad on your local craigslist under lost and found. Then if nothing by tomorrow call your local animal shelter and see if anyone has reported this cat missing.
I know that I can actually feel my cats microchip on his back between his shoulder blades. Itfeels like a grain of sand under his skin. You might see if you can feel for one and if so, definately take him to a shelter or to a vet. If you don't find the owner soon, i think you may have found a new family member.
@MissHoneyBun: It might depend on the area, but I've only seen two outdoor cats with collars in my neighborhood in 4 years. No other owners put collars on them (or replace them if they get lost). I can think of a dozen cats over the years, that I saw go into people's houses and be let out, without collars.
That being said, I'm a firm believer that if you haven't chipped your outdoor cat or given him a collar, he'll probably be lost one way or another eventually. We had outdoor feral cats growing up (our family did TNR), and the longest any of them lasted was 5 years. They'd just disappear after awhile.
So, yeah, I agree with PP to see if he's chipped. If not, he's yours.
We have an outdoor cat who chews off his collars.. or shreads them with his tongue. Once a cat has decided they are an outside cat, there is NO changing that! We had him chipped but he had a strange allergic reaction to it so we had to take it out... the Vet still doesn't understand why he reacted the way he did.
We had another cat (the first ones, mom) who was an outdoor cat as well... big mistake thinking she was fixed when we got her. Anyway, these neighbors of our decided they really liked her and we were horrible people for letting her live outside (if you have ever had an outside cat before you would know that if they are inside and want out... they wont. let. you. forget.) When they moved she suddenly dissapeared. Hmm. We knew they took her but there wasn't much we could do about it, or even prove. All of the sudden, 2 months later we hear her crying from ontop of our roof. Immaciated and with tags from Oklahoma on her collar. They DID take her, got ger fixed (hey, free for us now! They took her one week before her appt with us!) and she had found her way back home. We obviously took her to the vet so get her some fluids and he told us that cats have this uncanny ability to find their way home when they get lost, no matter where they end up. Crazy! So, I wouldn't be worried about it not finding its way home.
The only problem I have with people taking stray cats to the vet or the pound for owners to "find" is that after so long, if the owner doesn't come claim the cat in time it gets put to sleep. Not fair for anyone involved. Human or Feline.
@bellagio: Sad, but true. I will never have an outdoor cat. Even indoor/outside. The majority of them eventually go missing. All I know is my cat went missing last week. He's back now, thank goodness. But the thought of someone keeping him because they wanted him or just didn't but forth the effort to see if I was looking for him (trust me--everyone I met knew my cat was lost) broke my heart.
@MissHoneyBun: Same here. I would never let either of my cats outside without my supervision! Yes, they are curious about going outside, but I am too scared of them running away. Neither of them have chips and they dont wear collars because they are 100% indoor. The only time they are ever allowed outside is in our fenced in backyard where I will usually hold them in my arms or put them on the deck and monitor them while they are on the deck to not run away!
I would definitely not pick up a cat that looked healthy, even if it didn't have a collar. Cats often lose their collars--it's almost impossible to keep one on a cat that goes outdoors. Especially if it's common for there to be outdoor cats in the area, you might be doing more disservice than good by taking him home. Cats that go outdoors usually roam wide territories and their owners are usually aware of the risks that they face when they go outside.
I would consider keeping him, if I didn't know who he belonged to. I would have him scanned for a microchip and check the local lost postings first, though. If someone is sad that their cat doesn't come home, they should have kept better watch on their cat. I know cats can and do remove collars- but if you've got a cat who goes outdoors without your supervision, you are sending him outside with full knowledge that, one day, he may not return home. This could be because someone else took him, because he was picked up by animal control (and didn't have any identification), or because something worse happened (car accident, attacked by other animals, ate something poisonous, etc). If your cat goes outdoors unsupervised with no identification, you can't blame someone else for taking him in.
Most cats won't keep a collar on, and the ones that stay on really well are actually dangerous - they can get caught as the cats crawl in and out of things, possibly trapping the cat until it starves to death/gets seriously injured.
Letting cats run free is incredibly damaging to the environment. The bird populations alone are drastically effected, not to mention the reptile and small mammal populations. It's devastating. Don't just "put a collar" on the cat, don't put the cat outside at all.
@crayfish: How exactly does the killing of birds by cats damage the environment? Not trying to be snarky, I just really want to know.
@Meealissa: Killing birds could harm the environment in a number of ways. First, cats don't discriminate between birds there are tons of and bords who are endangered. Depending on the area in which you live, that could be problematic. Also, birds are an important part of the ecosystems in which they live. Pet overpopulation is a huge problem in many areas, so it is concievable that having tons of outdoor cats could, in the long term, to damage to bird populations and thus partially remove them from their ecosystems and food chains. That could have huge repurcussions for where those birds live- and that would harm the environment.
I'm not saying all the birds in the world are going to die off quickly in an outdoor-cat invasion, or that cats kill more birds than humans do (although, since we're putting our pet cats outdoors, when our cats kill birds it sort of is something we're doing). The thing is that we often don't see the effects of our actions on a larger scale. So, if my cat goes outside and kills several birds a year it doesn't seem like a problem- who misses a few birds per year? But it isn't just my cat- it's a lot of cats and a lot of birds. Keeping my cats inside won't solve the worlds problems, but every little bit helps, right?
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what do you do?
I was just driving home from a frickin 12 hour day and I see a cute orange cat on the side of the road. No collar, but doesn't look feral. So I pull over and he comes right up, and I pick him up and put him in my car. Take him home (which is not far away at all). But then, while he's still in the car, I worry that maybe he is just a friendly outdoor cat who lives outside all the time, and by driving him around I am disorienting him. He was way friendly and seemed well fed, and he turned down my offer of a french fry from McDonald's.
We live in a suburban area with a lot of outdoor cats especially in our cul de sac, but this one was on the main road.
Anyway, I took him back and opened the door and he jumped out and then I waited and he came back and was all snuggly. I love him. Now I am sad.
Also, the other day I was out in the country, and I saw like three dogs individually running around, no tags. WTF! Put a collar and tag on your outside pet!!!
Would you have kept the cat? Taken it to the vet for a chip? Left it chillin outside?