When a woman was walking her dog in a remote area in England last month, she saw an old suitcase lying on some abandoned train tracks up ahead but didn’t think anything of it. It wasn’t until her dog, which she was walking at the time, pulled her towards it and started sniffing ferociously that it occurred to her that something must be inside of it.
Still, she attempted to pull her dog away and keep walking, but when she got closer to the suitcase, she heard it: faint meows were coming from inside the suitcase, and this motivated the woman to act fast. She quickly unzipped the suitcase in the corner to peek inside and saw a mama cat and her kittens trapped inside.
The woman rushed to bring the cats to her house and quickly called the RSPCA to come and pick them up. Upon further inspection, they determined that the 8 kittens found in the suitcase were thin and malnourished while the mom was extremely dehydrated. When the RSPCA arrived to retrieve the abandoned animals, they actually separated the 5-year-old mom from her kittens in order to put her in intensive care.
“She was kept at the vets as she was so dehydrated and needed a drip, but has since been moved to the cattery to be with her litter and is doing much better,” Amy De-Keyzer of the RSPCA told The Dodo.
At just 5 weeks old, the kittens were very young but seemed to be in okay health. They required food to get them to an appropriate weight and the staff at the RSPCA gave them lots of love to show them that humans aren’t all bad, like the ones that stuffed them in a suitcase and left them to die.
In the cutest move ever, the staff decided to name them after the characters from the Disney movie, The Aristocrats, making their names Toulouse, Tiny Tim, Scat Cat, Berloiz, Alli, Duchess, Marie and Eve. Their mom was named Tarini. The shelter hopes to put the cats up for adoption soon, once they are stronger and able to be rehomed.
Since the area that they were found is remote and the woman didn’t hear the meowing until she was close to the suitcase, it’s likely that the suitcase would have been the grave for all 9 cats. It’s a mystery why anyone chooses to put animals they don’t want in a situation they can’t escape from, but it happens time and time again despite the fact that it’s fairly easy to surrender animals to local shelters. This story ended happily, however, and is a reminder to us all that these incidents happen frequently and people should be on the lookout.
