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Cat Rides 150 Miles in Car's Engine, OK

Posted on: Monday, 22 December 2003, 06:00 CST

For Tracker, the car ride from the Kalamazoo area to Rochester Hills was long, and could have cost him a life or two.

The long-haired gray cat rode unseen in the engine compartment of a female college student's car as she drove home for the holidays. Officials at Pontiac's Michigan Animal Rescue League, the feline's current home, say he probably survived the 150 mile-trip in the Chevrolet Tracker because the woman did not stop.

"He was very lucky," Patricia Verduin, the league's board president told The Daily Oakland Press of Pontiac.

Verduin said when the woman, who declined to give her name to the league, reached home "she heard this intense kitty-crying."

"She thought she'd run over a cat," Verduin said.

The woman and her family searched around the car. When they finally lifted the hood, they found a cat sitting on top of the engine.

"He was sitting very still," Verduin said. "It was like he didn't know what to do."

Tracker, a Russian Blue-angora mixed breed who emerged from his experience unscathed, may have slipped into the engine compartment to keep warm.

With a house full of pets, the woman turned Tracker over to the Michigan Animal Rescue League, where he is waiting to be adopted, shelter officials said.

"He's a very friendly cat," said Kayla Allen, the shelter's manager, who believes Tracker still is quite young. "He's a healthy eater, loves to play and interacts well with other animals."

Shelter officials are eager to find him a home as their facilities, like those around the state, are operating at capacity as a result of an increase in the number of homeless pets this year.

"It's been a bigger year for kittens and cats particularly," Verduin said as she pointed to a sign on one of the shelter's walls stating that one cat and its offspring can produce 420,000 cats in seven years.

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