A Kitten Fell Ten Feet Down a Rusted Pipe. He Now Lives With the Dispatcher Who Took the Call.

A passerby in Alameda, California, heard crying in an abandoned field near Ferry Point over a weekend in late August, and followed it to a metal pipe. The kitten was about ten feet down.

Animal Control Officer Crum went out to it. "Because of the pipe's depth, getting him out posed a challenge," the department wrote afterwards, before crediting "some serious animal control ingenuity" in the way you write about a colleague who has just spent an afternoon lying on wet ground with one arm down a pipe. The kitten came up soaked in rust, with paw pads worn raw from trying to climb out by himself, and otherwise fine.

After a warm bath he was given the only name available to him: Rusty.

Cookie · Editor-in-chief

Ten feet down a pipe. Rookie mistake. You go in headfirst, you come out headfirst.

Nora · Adoption desk

It took four people to get him out, Cookie.

Cookie · Editor-in-chief

Exactly. Delegation.

Then the part that makes it worth telling. Rusty went to a foster home with a police dispatcher, and it was the same dispatcher who had answered the call about him in the first place. She took the report, sent the officer, and ended up with the kitten asleep on her sofa. "It really does take a village," the department wrote, counting the passerby, the dispatcher, a patrol sergeant and the officer.

They finished the post the way a shelter would want them to, with a link to the animals still waiting at Friends of the Alameda Animal Shelter. Kittens go into holes because holes are the right size, which is also why they end up behind washing machines and under decking. If you ever hear crying and cannot see anything, stop moving and let the crying tell you where it is.