At 6:30 a.m, a Jeep pulled into a shopping mall parking lot in Mobile, Alabama. A man stepped out carrying a Pampers diaper box. He wandered up to a pet store, which didn’t open for several hours, and left the box at the door. Then he quickly walked away.
A short time later that morning, Margie Morris stepped out of the building next door, which is home to Project Purr Animal Rescue, a local cat haven and adoption center. She’d left her coffee in her car, and she dashed across the parking lot to retrieve it.
“I heard a tiny meow, but thought I had imagined it,” Morris, president of Project Purr told. “On my way back from my car, I heard it again. I went inside and told another volunteer, Jamie [Klein], that I heard a kitten outside.”
The two women went out to investigate. They searched the sidewalk and even peeked into the trash can — but they couldn’t find the source of the mewing. Then Klein spotted the Pampers box by the door of the pet store.
Inside was a cold, wet kitten who couldn’t be older than 5 or 6 weeks.
“I took him in and we put him on a blanket with a heating pad under it,” Morris said. “He was shivering. With the windchill, it felt like 30 degrees [outside]. If I hadn’t gone out to get my coffee, he would have gone unnoticed until the pet store employees arrived at 9 a.m.”
Later that day, the pet store shared its security camera footage with Morris, which showed the man dumping the kitten. However, they weren’t able to get a clear look at his face or read the license plate on the Jeep.
“It’s quite irresponsible to leave a kitten anywhere,” Noel Nichols, a volunteer at Project Purr, told The Dodo. “But just leaving the kitten without food or water, and nothing to protect it from the cold … it is not fair to the pet, and it’s not fair to the rescue.”
Sadly, this isn’t the first cat or kitten who’s been abandoned in front of Project Purr or the pet store. In fact, this kitten is the 40th abandoned animal this year.
But of course, it’s not the kitten’s fault, and Project Purr is doing everything it can to help him. The kitten, now named Bing, turned out to be a very sweet cat, according to Nichols.
“If you come into the room, he starts purring,” Nichols said. “He’s the most loving cat I’ve seen in a really long time. He will just absolutely melt you.”
“He’s very playful and he likes to attack anything dangly,” Nichols added. “He has a little stuffed elephant that he likes to play with, and he thinks he’s a big cat — so he’ll pounce on it, and play with it.”
Bing has a mild case of ringworm, a fungal infection that affects the skin, fur and nails, and he’s underweight, but he’s getting the best care possible. As soon as he’s healthy and has been neutered and vaccinated, Bing will be up for adoption.
“He should really be in a home with other pets, because he’s the kind of cat who needs companionship,” Nichols said. “He is the sweetest cat.”
