I found these photos by Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue (Twitter page) compelling. The image quality is good and they capture the instant the young calico kitten is pulled through a hole in an interior stud wall of a house. It looks like the bathroom. A stud wall has a wooden framework covered with plasterboard. There may be a different name for this kind of wall in different countries. This was a destructive process but the house owner was more than pleased for the firefighters to break open the wall.
The home owner heard plaintiff meows from inside the wall. This would have been disturbing. Deputy fire chief Timothy Heiser told ABC News that believes a stray mother cat found her way into the attic and gave birth there. Eventually the newborn then wandered off into the wall cavity. The kitten must have entered the cavity from above and perhaps fell into it. Mr Heiser says it is not uncommon for cats to be trapped inside walls.
They used thermal imaging to locate the kitten and then hacked at the wall while obviously taking care not to harm the kitten. ABC News say the kitten was taken to a local rescue center for adoption (and I guess a checkover and the usual treatments). Nice work.
That is not a newborn kitten…its ears are erect and its eyes are open…a newborn kitten would still be in the nest and unable to walk around on its own yet; I’d guess she is about 3-4 weeks old. Yes, it is not uncommon for mom cats to go into attics or other such places to have their kittens and when the kittens do start to be mobile and move around they can get stuck or fall into places where the mom cannot retrieve them. In my many years of rescue I’ve pulled them out from beind ceiling panels at a school, out of stovepipes and walls and from underneath houses, car hoods in a junk yard, from between bales of insulation at a factory…the list goes on. Thankfully this little girl had a healthy set of lungs to cry out and a caring homeowner who cared more about an innocent life than the bathroom wall. The endings to such predicaments are not always happy, though.