A distraught cat owner is accusing a rescue centre of "playing God" after her pet was mistakenly re-homed.

Mum-of-three Sam Cotton’s home in Benenden was seriously damaged by an electrical fire on December 5 and she was forced to live in hotels and sleep at friends’ homes in the aftermath of the blaze.

The 52-year-old reluctantly decided to leave her beloved tortoiseshell Tiggy, an outdoor cat, at the fire-damaged oast house on Golford Road, returning two or three times a day to feed him.

She also asked a couple of neighbours to keep an eye on the seven-year-old moggy, who wore a distinctive pink collar with a bell attached.

Mrs Cotton said: “Tiggy loved it at the house and would roam around the fields. I didn’t want to leave him, but when I’d moved house before he found it very difficult to settle and I couldn’t take him to different hotels, so I thought it best he stayed there until I found accommodation.”

But then Tiggy disappeared and after a extensive search, which involved Mrs Cotton setting up night vision cameras in her house and garden in an attempt to trace him, she eventually discovered that a neighbour, who was unaware of the situation, had taken him to Rolvenden Cat Rescue.

Tiggy was brought to the centre on December 29 and after Mrs Cotton finally discovered what had happened to him on February 6, she put in a call, thinking he would be quickly returned to her.

But she found out that microchipped Tiggy had been rehomed to another family, with the centre’s manager saying that she had got one digit wrong when reporting the cat’s chip number and because of this hadn’t been able to find who he belonged to.

A devastated Mrs Cotton said: “Tiggy was microchipped and if the number hadn’t registered the obvious thing to do would be to try it again.”

She claims the centre were “playing God” because they are against cats wearing collars, which they think are dangerous and had decided to give Tiggy a new home.

Mrs Cotton, who now lives in Cranbrook said: “We only put a collar on Tiggy so that he had a bell on him because he kept killing the mice and birds in the garden.”

Now the mum says she’s been told that the new family who have Tiggy are reluctant to give him back as they've become attached to him.

She said: “I’m awake all night because of the situation. I’m devastated. It’s a shocking mistake that should have never happened.”

Ruth Punyer, homing manager, at Rolveden Cat Rescue, strongly denied that Tiggy’s collar had been a factor in his rehoming, saying that although she didn't approve of collars she would never rehome a lost cat because they were wearing one.

She said that there had been “a genuine mix-up” with Tiggy's microchip, and that he had been re-homed in good will.

She added: “It has taken Sam Cotton six weeks to contact us about her cat, during which time she has been on holiday.

"If she had contacted vets and rescue centres, or put up posters about him missing we would have picked up on this immediately without this bad feeling.

“We have enough work to do with rehoming abandoned cats and we really wouldn’t want to go to all the trouble of finding a home for Tiggy and now having to return him for no reason.”

She has pledged to get Tiggy returned to Mrs Cotton by the weekend.