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Dealership comes to the rescue

Staff at an Auckland car dealership came to the rescue of a kitten after the little one decided to hide in a police car after causing havoc on an Auckland motorway.
Posted on 20 August, 2018
Dealership comes to the rescue

Staff at Giltrap Motors at Glenfield came to the rescue of a kitten after the little one decided to hide in a police car after causing havoc on Auckland's Northwestern Motorway.

Police said an officer and five members of the public were trying to catch the kitten when it clambered up underneath the stationary patrol car and firmly hid on an unreachable ledge near the car's diff.

Police could not pull him out at the scene, so drove him to Giltrap Motors, where a four-man team pulled the car apart to extract the kitten and took him to the nearby Glenfield Veterinary Clinic.

Giltrap workshop foreman Jason De Gier, pictured below, told the NZ Herald that a police officer arrived at about 11 am yesterday with the kitten wedged above the police car's rear differential.

"We had to drop the whole rear suspension off and pull the differential down to get the cat out," said De Gier.

"We got four guys on to it. With the impact gun and the right tools, it took half an hour to get the cat out. It was like being in a pit stop [at a car race], the guys just got stuck in.

"As soon as the cat was out, I raced it down to the vet."

"The mechanics were incredible and it was like watching a Formula 1 pit crew work on a racing car with the speed they removed the exhaust and parts of the suspension to get to the poor kitten," said Constable Warwick Lyes to the NZ Herald. 

In a Facebook post, Glenfield Veterinary Clinic said: "He amazingly survived the night and is such a strong and purry little guy we are all hoping and praying he makes it! Please keep this wee man in your thoughts and prayers this weekend. He's such a fighter but will definitely need all the warm happy thoughts he can get!"

The four mechanics who extracted the kitten were Brad Bower, Reid Munro, Andrew Nijland and Jason Rowntree.