Three kittens were left for dead next to a commercial recycling bin in Hudson, Wis., trapped inside a taped-up cardboard box outside a restaurant, where they sat until a passerby found them.
The discovery of the trio by a property management employee was made midmorning on Dec. 11 outside the Buffalo Wild Wings on Pearson Drive, according to Kathi Pelnar, with Animal Control in Hudson. However, one of the kittens scampered away within seconds of the man picking up the box, Pelnar said.
The other two were taken in by Animal Control and turned over to the Animal Humane Society in Woodbury, where they will be put up for adoption soon.
"They would have been crushed" had they spent another day fighting the elements before the recycling truck's arrival, Pelnar said Thursday.
It was Matt Puhl, while on cleanup rounds from one property to another, who happened upon the box next to one of the two recycling bins.
Puhl said he tossed it aside with one hand and was just about to put it in a bin, when the fuzzy fugitive "came out of the top" through the loosened packing tape and made a break for it "across the road into the tall grass of a vacant lot."
The other kittens, still in the box, "weren't moving too much," Puhl added. "I don't know if they were starving or freezing or what."
The 24-year-old Puhl, who picked up a lot of grounders as a middle infielder for four seasons with the Minnesota Gophers, believes that the recycling worker making the next day's pickup "would've just felt weight in there, and whatever is in there, is in there."
Pelnar, who has been the animal control field for 40 years, said, "I was upset. It was a pretty heinous thing, whoever did this."
She described the roughly 8-week-old kittens that were rescued as "very healthy, fat and happy" when she first saw them, but also "scared."
One of them is a long-haired, black female; the other a black and gray male tabby. By the looks of the two she has seen, Pelnar suspects they are from the same litter.
The kitten that got away, if not yet gathered up by someone, is destined "to be another feral cat or starving to death, out in the cold and without anything to eat," Pelnar said.
She said the abandonment was so unnecessary because "everybody is looking for kittens at this time of year for Christmas gifts. Usually shelters are short of kittens for adoptions [around the holidays]," she added. "Someone would have wanted them."
Carrie Libera, a spokeswoman for the Animal Humane Society, said the kittens that came to the Woodbury location weighing about 24 ounces each are now "in foster care, so they can gain weight … and also so they can be socialized before being made available for adoption."
She said it will be at least another week before they "return to the shelter for their spay or neuter surgery and then be available for adoption."
Paul Walsh • 612-673-4482
