Emily the stowaway cat flies home

Emily the stowaway cat has flown home in the lap of luxury.

The curious cat from Wisconsin who disappeared two months ago and wound up travelling to France in a cargo container arrived at Milwaukee airport last night, greeted by her family and a horde of reporters.

“She’ll be held on to a lot all the way home. And then when we get home, too, she’ll be cuddled a lot,” owner Donny McElhiney said.

Her return in business class on a Continental Airlines flight was a sharp departure from her trip the other way, when she arrived thin and thirsty but still alive.

On her flight home, Emily rejected a menu of peppered salmon filet and “opted for her French cat food” and water, the airline said.

“She seems a little calmer than she was before, just a little quieter, a little, maybe, wiser,” Lesley McElhiney said.

A Continental cargo agent carried Emily from the plane and handed her over to the McElhineys’ nine-year-old son, Nick Herndon. Emily meowed and pawed at reporters’ microphones as the family answered questions.

The airline offered to fly the cat home from Paris after her tale spread around the world and she cleared a one-month quarantine.

Emily vanished from her home in Appleton, Wisconsin, in late September. She apparently wandered into a nearby paper company’s distribution centre and crawled into a container of paper bales.

The container went by truck to Chicago and by ship to Belgium before Emily was found on October 24 at Raflatac, a laminating company in Nancy, France. Workers at Raflatac used her tags to phone her vet in Wisconsin, and the vet called her owners.