CANADA – When 10-year-old Mackenzie Stevens and 11-year-old Isobel Schneider heard faint meowing sounds coming from beneath a portable trailer at Trout Creek Elementary School in Summerland, B.C., they had no idea there were actually five cats trapped inside the crawl space.
“Oh my gosh, there’s a cat in there. How do we get it out?” Mackenzie said when they heard them.
The cat continued to meow as the girls looked for a way into the crawl space.
They heard the sounds of meowing and scratching
“We could hear it scratching the walls inside and we were like, ‘we have to get it out,'” stated Isobel.
Mackenzie Stevens and Isobel Schneider found a mother cat who had been trapped under a trailer for five days with her newborn kittens (AlleyCats animal rescue)
The pair were determined to free the animal, but at first, couldn’t find a way into the space below the trailer.
More neighborhood children began to arrive and soon they helped Mackenzie and Isobel find a piece of plywood that looked like it had been recently placed over a hole in the base of the trailer.
The girls rushed to find some help from their parents. One of their friend’s fathers finally came to the rescue with a power drill he then used to remove the board covering the hole.
Inside they discovered an emaciated, black and brown tabby cat.
“She was really thin. You could feel her ribs when you pet her,” Isobel stated.
The girls named the cat ‘Summer’ and they took it to Mackenzie’s home for food and water.
Mackenzie’s mother then posted photos of the cat on social media.
The very next day neighbour Laura Caskey recognized the tabby cat as a stray female that had given birth to four kittens in her garden two weeks earlier. However, the cat had decided to flee with the kittens during a thunderstorm.
Hopeful the kittens might still be alive, Caskey rushed over to the portable and removed the plywood and went up into the crawl space.
Kittens found alive after being missing for 2 weeks
“I climbed under there with a flashlight and in a back corner behind a pillar I heard a meow,” she stated.
“There they were. The little black and white one with his little beady eyes was looking right at me. I just could not believe it.”
Caskey later learned the family of cats had been trapped under the crawl space for about five days in the Okanagan summer heat.
The mother cat and kittens are currently at Mackenzie Stevens’ home.
“If we didn’t hear that cat, she and those kittens would have died,” Mackenzie stated. “It’s a really cool feeling that we rescued them.”
Way to go, girls!
