FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. — A cat that was accidentally taken to a dump in a couch is back home with its family.
Neal Augenstein, a reporter with WTOP in the Washington, D.C., area, said he searched for the 8-year-old domestic shorthair for days when the cat didn’t come for dinner.
“For a couple of days, I walked around the neighborhood holding a bag of treats going, ‘Mike, Mike! Mike, Mike! Mike, Mike!’” Augenstein told WRC. “And I would stand in front of sewers — no luck. I walked around the block. And it really was a mystery. That was the hardest part, not knowing where he was.”
Then he remembered that he had gotten rid of three couches days before.
“My wife and I did a quick check under the cushions of one couch that was torn up and that our cats, Mike and Mochi, had climbed and hid in before,” Augenstein said on WTOP.
They weren’t at the junk warehouse where he thought the couches were taken, but they were not there.
“They said our couches were still in the warehouse, so I rushed over there,” Augenstein said. “Two of the three couches were there, but the ripped one had stayed on the truck and been sent to the I-66 Transfer Station, which is where recycling is done before trash is eventually sent to the landfill.”
He had little hope that Mike would be found.
“When stuff is dumped here, that’s going to be crushed and going to go to the landfill,” Augenstein said. “So, it was so close to being a tragedy.”
But heavy equipment operator Mauricio Martinez saw something in the pit where they dump the trash at the landfill.
Mike the cat was on a ledge, WRC reported.
The cat couldn’t jump, so the workers had to get creative to rescue Mike from his perch.
“It took us about 10 minutes to get the cat down from the time we noticed it,” Joshua Murphy, landfill assistant superintendent, told WRC. “Came up with the plan, took a loader bucket underneath and had to be a little persuasive with the cat to get it to jump, because it didn’t want to move at all.”
Mike was rescued for a bit, but then got away from the crew and got into a tunnel to a storage room, where animal control captured him.
Mike was taken to one animal rescue, then a second shelter where the cat and its owner were finally reunited.
Luckily, Mike was microchipped.
“I think that he still has a little bit of the smell of the transfer station on him, but that’s fading away,” Augenstein said.
“There were so many hands touched Mike, and there were so many places where things could have gone very badly, but things turned out perfectly, and I’m delighted to have him home,” he told WRC.
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