Caturday felid trifecta: Cat named Squishy rescued from trash compacter; four-eared rescue kitten named Audio; Minneapolis’s popular Cat Walk; and lagniappe

October 5, 2024 • 8:45 am

We’ll begin Caturday with my favorite: a cat rescue story from the Washington Post (click on headline below, or find it archived here).  This cat squeaked through, but acquired a rather grim name:

An excerpt:

Mark Motta was checking the hydraulics on a recycling truck just past 7 a.m. when he noticed two shiny eyes looking at him from behind the compactor’s crushing mechanism.

Motta took a close look and saw that a tiny gray and white kitten was stuck in the hopper, where recyclable materials are loaded and compacted. The kitten was covered in oil and shaking in fright.

The driver of the truck, Moses White, had already started the engine to head out on his rounds in Burlington County, N.J., that day, July 8. Motta told White to turn off the engine, then he climbed into the truck’s bin and delicately pried the kitten free from the hopper.

“I’ve had cats my whole life, and I know that when they’re babies, if you grab them by the skin on their necks, it makes them think they’re being carried by their mother,” he said. “So that’s what I did.”

The kitten didn’t fight him.

“She was really scared, but she seemed happy to be rescued,” he said.

Motta used his bright yellow safety shirt to wipe the kitten off the best he could, then he called safety officer Samantha Stamile to let her know what had happened.

Stamile told Motta to put the kitten in a box, then she rushed to her office.

“I got there, and there’s this sweet little kitten, absolutely saturated in some kind of oil from inside the truck,” she said. “She also had a green eye discharge, and she was wheezing. We decided to clean her up right away.”

Stamile and Motta took the kitten to the fleet mechanic shop and gave her several baths with Dawn dish soap to remove the oil.

“The first bath did nothing — she needed quite a few,” said Stamile, noting that she also cleaned the kitten’s eyes with a saline solution and gauze.

Motta decided there was only one name that suited the cat: Squishy.

“I thought it was perfect, because if I hadn’t seen her that morning, there would have been no saving her,” he said.

And so the nice man rescued Squishy!

Stamile gave Squishy some cat food, then took her to All Creatures Veterinary Care Center in Sewell, N.J., where she was examined at no charge and given antibiotics for an upper respiratory infection. The vet said she appeared to be about 2 months old.

Otherwise, the kitten was fine, Stamile said, so she contacted Rise Again Animal Rescue, a New Jersey animal foster and adoption nonprofit. The Asbury Park Press was among several local news organizations to cover the happy rescue.

“I told them I’d like to foster Squishy until she’s old enough to be spayed, vaccinated and put up for adoption,” said Stamile, 30, who has fostered cats for four years for the animal rescue.

Ekaterina Sedia, a founder of Rise Again Animal Rescue, said she added Squishy to her adoption list.

And the safety officer rescued the cat:

Stamile said her two daughters, Arabella, 7, and Adelyn, 2, were delighted when she brought Squishy home and introduced her to the family’s other cat, Rascal.

“My kids have always loved fostering cats, and it instills the importance of treating all life kindly and with respect,” Stamile said.

Squishy is a good fit with the household, and she now enjoys romping around with Rascal and playfully jumping on everyone’s bare feet when they wiggle their toes, she said.

The story from Facebook’s Rise Again Animal Rescue:

And here’s a similar story from California, this time in a recycling plant:

************************

A kitten with four ears was found in Tennessee. Click to read:

An excerpt (story is from July 31):

A Mt. Juliet shelter is now the temporary home of a four-eared kitten, whose presence at the facility is shedding a light on a growing need for support.

True Rescue in Mt. Juliet said it’s the largest communal cat recue in the South.

The shelter recently welcomed a new litter found abandoned in a box, including a four-eared feline that staff members have named “Audio.”

They’re really creative with the names, aren’t they?

Kristin Condite, the director of operations for True Rescue, told News 2 that employees first noticed the extra pair of ears during an exam: “Whenever we took him out of his carrier, my counterpart said, ‘What’s on his ear?’ And when we looked closer, it appears as if Audio has actually four ears on his head, so he has two right facing and two rear facing. It’s extremely abnormal.”

Audio:

Eight-week-old Audio and his ear-resistible charm are garnering a lot of attention on social media, which is putting the shelter in the spotlight at a time when it’s most needed.

“We’ve had ongoing issues with drainage problems and foundation issues, but this past Sunday, a week from Sunday and Monday, back-to-back evenings we had water in the building. Sunday night, it was four inches from the rear wall to the front doors,” said Condite.

. . .Eight-week-old Audio and his ear-resistible charm are garnering a lot of attention on social media, which is putting the shelter in the spotlight at a time when it’s most needed.

“We’ve had ongoing issues with drainage problems and foundation issues, but this past Sunday, a week from Sunday and Monday, back-to-back evenings we had water in the building. Sunday night, it was four inches from the rear wall to the front doors,” said Condite.

As for Audio, shelter employees said they will not remove his extra ears unless they start to harm him.

If you want to adopt Audio, you’ll have to wait a few more weeks as he continues to be monitored by doctors. In the meantime, the four-eared feline is bringing extra joy to True Rescue.

“A really frustrating week. There have been a lot of setbacks since the flooding that have been going on in our world, and for Audio to come at this time…it really does feel like a good luck charm,” Condite said.

To check out all of the adoptable animals at True Rescue, click here.

x

And a video of Audio. It’s not clear whether he’s been adopted (if you want to find out, you’ll have to click above and fill out a form, though I didn’t get a response when I searched for “Audio”. I’m betting he was adopted!

 

**********************

The Dodo reports on an annual Cat Walk that started innocuously in Minneapolis, but now has become a big annual event. It’s now happened seven times, and hundreds of people go on the two-hour Cat Tour.

If you live there, you may want to participate:

An excerpt:

Small cats. Big cats. Young cats. Old cats.

Whatever kind of cat you have, the people of Wedge, a neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota, want to see them.

In 2017, John Edwards, the editor and publisher of Wedge Live, an online publication, started the town’s first annual cat tour, taking participants through Wedge to admire the neighborhood cats.

Edwards said the idea sprang from two things: One was his habit of going on long walks by himself, during which he took photos of neighborhood cats and posted them to Wedge’s X (formerly Twitter) page. The other was the town’s preexisting walking tours of historic homes.

“I combined the popularity of the cat photos on Twitter with making fun of the idea of historic home tours,” Edwards told The Dodo. “The first tour we held was called the ‘Historic cat walking tour’ or something like that.”

The first cat tour was small. Edwards only remembers about 20 to 30 people in attendance. But over the years, the tour has grown tremendously — both in size and popularity.

“It’s gotten so large at this point that it’s difficult to interact with people on the tour and say, ‘Hey, you know, this is this cat’s name, and they are this many years old,’ and stuff like that,” Edwards said. “Now it’s basically a mob of people walking around the neighborhood, following me at the head of the line — but the crowd is so big that I can’t really see the back of the line. It’s organized chaos, flowing through the neighborhood, spilling off the sidewalk. Street traffic gets blocked.”

Cat lovers eager to show off their felines can register in advance for the tour to pass by their house. However, according to Edwards, many cat owners spontaneously join the tour by showcasing their cats as the crowd wanders by.

“Cat owners realize the cat tour’s coming through, and they’ll bring their cats up to the window,” Edwards said. “We end up with maybe twice as many cats as the ones who are pre-registered.”

While some people simply bring their cats to the window, others take them outside on leashes or in  shopping bags, backpacks and strollers. Some go the theatrical route, presenting their cats “Lion King”-style on their balconies, which results in loud cheers from the crowd of walkers, Edwards said.

“It shocks me each year that people love it,” Edwards said. “It just started as a concept and interesting theme, and those don’t always work out to be great in reality, but this is beyond anyone’s wildest expectations for how successful something like this could be.”

Here’s a news report on the Cat Walk:

********************

Lagniappe from Simon: Happy Caturday!

e3dsx3erfgvve32`12`1dc 2c

h/t: Gregory

8 thoughts on “Caturday felid trifecta: Cat named Squishy rescued from trash compacter; four-eared rescue kitten named Audio; Minneapolis’s popular Cat Walk; and lagniappe”

  1. There *is* good in the world. People rescuing cats like Squishy, cats with two ears beloved by their staff, an entire neighborhood crowded with people out and about to honor its town’s cats. What if all that could be multiplied a thousand fold?

  2. Wonderful stories!
    They should sequence Audio’s DNA, something interesting could come out (I’d bet on some mutated homeobox gene).

Comments are closed.