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."
