A couple shopping at their local home-improvement store heard noises from inside a pallet wrapped in plastic – before opening it and discovering a kitten trapped inside.
Shelby Elko, 29, and her husband, Alex, 32, from Grand Rapids, Michigan, were browsing the garden section of the local store on April 26 when they heard a noise, which they both thought could be a bird.
Having heard the noise again, the couple started looking for where the sound was coming from, tracing it to a plastic-wrapped pallet of lava rock bags.
Shelby tried her best to reach the noise, but after failing to get high enough, she called Alex to jump up while capturing the moment on video.
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In the stunning footage, Alex can be seen ripping a hole in the plastic wrap, which then causes a kitten to fall out onto a sack below.
“Oh my gosh; it’s a kitten,” Shelby can be heard saying in the video, as she moved closer to check that the cat was okay.
Having informed the store’s front desk, Shelby was told they do not keep cats on the premises.
She then tried to figure out the next steps, given that she was caring for such a delicate animal with no mom to help it survive.
Shelby also asked for the support and advice of her aunt, who fosters kittens, and the first evening she was up every couple of hours, checking on the kitten, weighing, feeding and stimulating him.
The following day the cat, later named Oscar, was taken to a local rescue, so that he could be around other kittens his age until he is old enough to return to Shelby.
Shelby said: “We were in the garden section looking to get concrete, when we heard a very faint noise.
“We both heard it once and thought, oh, maybe it was just a bird, but then we heard it again.
“I started looking around, and that’s when I thought I saw something move in the plastic-wrapped pallet.
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“I tried to reach it, which is why you see the hole in the middle of the pallet, but it was so high up that Alex jumped up there.
“That’s when I decided to record, because who knows what I could have seen move in the plastic-wrapped pallet.
“When the kitten fell, there was immediate panic. As you can see in the video, it gets a bit chaotic.
“Those who understand rescues online have been great and super supportive.”
