Published: September 21, 2009 09:23 am      

Kitten tossed from Twin Spans

Local man sees it fall and rescues it

CARRIERE — It seemed to Kenny Abney of Carriere, to be a regular day on the job last July 10. It was a Friday and he was looking forward to the weekend. As he was running his tugboat and moving the barges used for the construction of the new Twin Spans across Lake Pontchartrain, he and his crew saw something that hadn’t seen before. A flying cat.

Dropping from the across the top railing of the bridge and through the air in front of them was a tiny black kitten. It landed with a thud in the choppy waters 80 feet beneath the high rise portion of the bridge. “This cat came flying over the bridge and landed in the water,” said Abney. “Someone had to throw it out of a car, there was no other way it could have happened.”

Pointing out that his crew and himself had rescued about a dozen raccoons and nutrias following Hurricane Gustav last year, Abney said in all his time as a tugboat captain, he hadn’t seen anyone toss a pet off the bridge. “With Gustav we saw a lot of raccoons and stuff, but not a cat,” continued Abney.

Realizing the kitten had managed to survive the fall and was now struggling to swim, some men on a smaller boat scooped the kitten up in a net. That is when Abney called out to them to put it on a nearby barge where he could pick it up. “We dried it off and wrapped it up,” said Abney of the tiny five-week-old kitten. “It wouldn’t have made it if we hadn’t been there.”

But the moment the kitten had a chance, it skirted away from the men and crawled beneath a large storage container on the barge. “It climbed up underneath one of those big shipping containers,” explained Abney. “And we couldn’t reach it there.”

When no amount of coaxing or food would draw the kitten from beneath the container, Abney knew he would have to some how catch it. So, the next day he returned with a live trap and set it up with some food. But capturing the kitten, now afraid of everything, but would prove a challenge for Abney. “It was pretty skittish,” he said.

But Abney didn’t give up. After several days of feeding the cat and talking to it, trying to coax it from its hiding place, he managed to catch the kitten. That is when he brought the tiny animal home to his wife, Liz.

“I was shocked,” said Liz. “I couldn’t believe someone would do that.”

Noting that the kitten had signs of abuse, Liz said it had no skin on his nose and that the skin around his eyes was covered in sores. “I don’t know what she endured before they threw him off that bridge,” she continued. “But it couldn’t have been good.”

Adding that for the first month, the kitten holed up in the laundry room rarely venturing out, Liz said it took awhile for it to begin to realize it was safe now. “I think she was afraid of loud noises,” she said, pointing out that perhaps the days on the barge with all the noises of a construction site may have terrified him even more. “she wouldn’t come out of my laundry room except to skirt out once in a while,” she said.

Continuing, Liz said that the kitten, now named Buttons for a tiny “button” of white on his chest, was acclimating into his new home quite well. “She goes running around here with the other cat like a maniac,” she said.

Adding that the kitten now had a permanent home with them, Kenny said, “She won the lottery I guess you could say.”