An animal welfare officer in Florida was able to flush out a kitten who got himself stuck in a tricky spot this week.
The black-and-white male kitten was heard “meowing for help” inside a drainage pipe near a Pensacola detention center, and the local sheriff’s office called the Escambia County Department of Animal Welfare to assist with the situation, according to a Wednesday social media post from the animal welfare department.
Lead Animal Welfare Officer Sgt. Merideth Roberson tried setting a humane trap and playing sounds of a mother cat to “lure the kitten closer,” to no avail. Roberson saw the young cat’s “beady little eyeballs way at the end of the tunnel,” she said in a county news release, but the skeptical kitten stayed put.
That’s when she realized she was going to have to take the plunge into the pipe herself, first descending a ladder and ultimately crawling what she estimated was 150 feet through the drainage pipe, essentially cornering the kitten at the end of the tunnel.
“I was able to snatch him up and then army crawl back to the ladder,” she said.
Roberson recalled, “I was a little scared crawling down in there.” She noted that she was “super thankful” to have been able to get the kitten out and “give him a second chance at life.”
The county animal welfare department said that the kitten, now appropriately named Pipes, “received a clean bill of health” and “will be available for adoption soon.”
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Pipes’ dramatic rescue comes on the heels of another cat making headlines for getting stuck in a drainpipe. That feline, a 1-year-old female named John, failed to show up for breakfast at her home in the English town of Clevedon one day earlier this month, the BBC reported. Her owner eventually found the cat with her head sticking out of a pipe in a garage ceiling. John was rescued by the local fire department and is now fine.