Community members in Elkhart County, Indiana didn’t hesitate to stop their day to save a kitten from a drain pipe. Thanks to several groups, the kitten was reunited with its cat family.
They first spotted the kitten’s mother with her kittens. While they were able to catch the momma and her other babies, one kitten got spooked and jumped through a broken gutter guard.
That left the kitten 3 ft. down into an angled manhole pipe. The kitten tried, but the drain was too slippery for her to climb back up.
Down the drain
The workers tried everything they could to bring the kitten to safety. Eventually, they were out of options and had to call in the big guns at Catsnip Etc.
Catsnip Etc’s rescuers first had to track down the pipe the kitten was hiding in since there were several interconnecting pipes. They even brought out their camera but still couldn’t find the kitten.
Midnight came and the rescuers had to give up their search. The next day, community members and the folks at Miller Sewer Cleaning worked to get down into a manhole the drain was connected to in order to save the kitten.
“We came up with the plan to run water down the pipe that she jumped into, and try to follow the path the water took to figure out where she was,” Missy McNeal of Catsnip Etc. told Love Meow. “It was nowhere close to where she fell and we could have never located it.”
A woman named Ashlee is responsible for capturing the kitty. She saw a plea on social media for a thin person who didn’t mind crawling through a narrow, filthy pipe with an inch of water in it.
“She came to the address, went down the manhole, and never looked back,” McNeal said.
The kitten actually walked right toward Ashlee after she had spent hours underground searching for the cat.
It took a village
“No one can imagine the sense of relief we all felt when Ashlee yelled she had the kitten,” McNeal said.
The kitten was cleaned off, warmed up, and treated for dehydration. Once the kitten was deemed to be stable, she was reunited with her family who were all in foster care.
“She ran right up to her family and snuggled under her mom’s chin,” McNeal said.
The family of feral cats are doing very well and are very happy to be together again thanks to an entire community of people who worked to make it so.