Workers in New York were going through a maintenance yard when they heard something they did not expect. While walking past a large industrial shredder, they heard the meowing of several kittens coming from inside the core chamber. Not being experts at handling felines and not wanting to injure them, they called a local animal rescuer who quickly arrived to save the kittens from what could have easily been a gruesome fate.
Maintenance workers hear tiny screams coming from inside their machinery
On September 24, animal rescuer John Debacker saved three kittens that were trapped within an industrial shredder in Long Island, as seen in a video posted on his official page on Facebook. Debacker has served as the Vice President of the cat rescue Long Island Cat/Kitten Solution, Inc. since 2021, and he has actually been featured in one of our past articles for saving a black cat that was sleeping in the middle of the highway back in August.
In the post, Debacker said he was grateful for the quick thinking of the maintenance workers since the kittens would have been “completely obliterated” if the shredder had been turned on without them noticing the animals inside. Then in a separate follow-up reply, he revealed that they had proceeded with caution after discovering the days-old kittens within the chamber.
“This rescue may seem confusing,” Debacker wrote, “but workers first heard the screams inside the machine and began to dismantle it to locate the source of the noise.”
He continued, “Upon finding the kittens, they placed a towel in the machine and put it back together while they waited for my arrival.”
The video of the rescue shows one of the workers who had found the kittens earlier carefully taking apart a tube connected to the shredder, while Debacker and the man could hear them making muffled cries. He then walks toward the other side of the machine so that he can dislodge the tube from the center chamber using a screwdriver.
After popping it open, the rescuers are finally able to reach inside the shredder to save the felines. One at a time, Debacker lifted the three kittens who were still resting on a towel out of the machine with one hand. He breathed a sigh of relief as he pulled the three balls of fur from potential danger.
“I was nervous that I’d be pulling out dead kittens,” the rescuer told The Dodo. “But was relieved seeing them all alive.”
The three kittens were safely transported to a foster home
After securing the litter of kittens, Debacker brought them to a foster home in Suffolk County. Another video of the rescue from ABC13 shows Debacker holding one of the kittens in his hand while it meows on a black and white blanket.
He attempted to find and catch the mother of the cats, but he was unable to locate her while searching the yard. In a reply to a commenter on Facebook, he said that “she never came for them.” Indeed, bringing the mother along would have been the best-case scenario for the kittens, especially at this very early stage in their development. But in lieu of that, their human foster mother will be bottle-feeding them until they are old enough for adoption.
Several commenters on Facebook were appreciative of the timely rescue. One wrote, “Thank you for saving them, John. This could have been horrendous for those babies had they not been meowing. So glad everything worked out the way it did.”
Another said the kittens were lucky that their cries were heard in the nick of time: “That sure was a close call for these adorable little babies! Whew! I am so happy that the workers heard their cries before turning that machine on.”
