A Texas Roadhouse cook was more than willing to risk the potentially gross things hiding in a storm drain in order to save a kitten’s life.
Melissa Gates was at a United Dairy Farmers in Milford, Ohio when she heard the cries of a kitten coming from a storm drain.
Gates could tell by the desperate cries that the kitty, later named Piper, was horrified by her situation. There were two different drains, and Gates and several other Good Samaritans tried to lure the kitten out of both of them.
Down the drain
They dropped food and cooed at Piper but nothing worked. It was obvious at this point that the only way to save the kitten was to go into the drain and get her.
A cook at the Texas Roadhouse immediately volunteered to go down into the drain after the cat.
The job wasn’t as simple as walking into a drain and grabbing the kitten. But the cook was still down for it anyway.
”So we just decided at that point and time that we were going to put somebody down in the drain,” Gates told FOX 19 Now. “So somebody who is a cook at Texas Roadhouse decided, ‘I’ll do it.’ He volunteered. So we had him by his feet literally hanging in the drain with a video, so he had my phone to take videos to see if we could see her, because we weren’t sure what side she was on.”
But even with all that effort, they still couldn’t reach the kitten. Others who had stopped to help lost hope and had to get on with their day and left. But Gates, a volunteer foster mom at Dream House Rescue, refused to leave the kitten on her own.
”I thought, ‘I can’t leave her.’ The way she was crying, there was no way I could leave her without really trying and saying, ‘Ok, I give up.’ I wasn’t ready to give up,” Gates said.
That’s when she had one more clever idea. She wasn’t sure if it would work, but it was worth a try.
”We actually played on Youtube video of a mommy calling for her kittens, and about five minutes after that, she came to the edge, and we just snatched her up out of the drain, and the girl handed her up to me,” Gates said.
Out of the drain and into a home
It is believed that Piper had been stuck in the drain for at least a week.
”She was really cold and dehydrated but she’s made a pretty good rebound,” Gates said. “She seems happy.”
Gates said she will foster Piper until she’s ready to be put up for adoption with Dream House Rescue.