Wholesome Wins·
HIGHWAY RESCUE KITTEN
A roadside cat is rescued from a perilous highway scene and whisked to a vet, turning luck and mercy into an unlikely internet rescue tale.
Was this luck or bad timing for the cat?
Be one of the first to vote.
He was lying on the side of the highway while cars kept going.
That was the scene the poster came upon on a Friday the 13th: a cat, exposed on the roadside, with traffic flowing past as if he weren't there. "Everyone was just passing him!!" the poster wrote. The cat looked like he had "had just given up."
The first glance made it clear this was not a harmless roadside stray. The cat had road rash around his eye socket and a "really nasty, big laceration under one leg." For a moment, the damage looked grim enough that the poster feared the worst. But there was one immediate relief: "his eye is intact!!! thank god"
The poster didn't leave him there. They pulled the cat off the side of the highway and rushed him to the vet.
At the clinic, the cat was treated quickly. The vet gave him pain meds and fluids, checked him over, cleaned up the wound, and wrapped it with manuka honey. After that, the outlook turned strangely better than the roadside scene had suggested. "Luckily, little man seemed to have escaped any serious injury... somehow."
The cat's condition was still serious enough to need care, but the rescue had apparently come just in time. What had looked like a helpless body on the shoulder of the highway turned out to be a cat that, against the odds, had made it through without major internal damage.
By the end of the post, the moment had turned into a familiar kind of internet destiny. The poster said the "cat distribution system has finally found me," turning the rescue into the kind of unplanned encounter cat people recognize instantly: one minute driving past traffic, the next one cat richer.
And because the day was already Friday the 13th, the poster closed by calling it either the luckiest or the unluckiest one for the cat. On the highway, he had been left behind. A little while later, he was off the road, treated, wrapped up, and no longer alone.