Workplace Nightmares·
THE MILL KITTEN RESCUE
A steel mill tale follows a worker as he confronts cruelty, crawls through a maze to rescue a starving kitten, and begins a life-changing act of compassion.
Was this a rescue or went too far?
Be one of the first to vote.
At a steel mill full of stray cats, one tiny kitten nearly became the casualty of a coworker's cruelty.
The electrical technician who told the story says the mill has long had a loose colony of cats wandering around the property. The workers know them, feed them, and let them stick around because, as the poster put it, "we feed them to keep the mice away and cause they're awesome." Most of the cats are friendly regulars. Then, a few months ago, while the narrator was working in the mechanic's shop, a new one appeared: a "sweet little baby" cat, small enough to look fragile at a glance.
The first thing the narrator noticed was how thin she was. She was "small and very malnourished," barely more than a little body moving through the shop. And then came the part that turned the sight into a confrontation.
A mechanic said this was the cat he had been throwing rocks at to scare away or kill. He admitted he "hates cats" and claimed he thought leaving them to starve would be crueler. That was the moment the story changed from a stray wandering the mill to a kitten in immediate danger from someone on the payroll.
The narrator was furious. They told their wife they were "coming home with her," and set about getting the kitten out of the mill before anything worse happened. But the rescue was not simple. The cat had wedged herself into a tunnel and cable tray system inside the steel mill, and the narrator spent about an hour crawling through it to reach her.
It was a grim, cramped retrieval job inside the guts of the place, but it worked. The kitten was finally coaxed into a box and taken home.
Now she has a name: Aelin. She is healthy, cuddly, and very much alive because someone decided to go looking for her instead of leaving her there. The narrator describes her as a "cuddly, chirpy, spiky, little pumpkin," the kind of cat someone "would kill for." According to the vet, she'll probably stay small forever, but "she's fully healthy."