Curiousity didn't kill this cat, but it sure put it in an embarrasing predicament.
There was panic on all sides while the furry creature was lodged inside.
The little rescue kitten named Spirit had only been adopted for one day when it gave its owners the scare of their life.
Ashley Martin says she came home and her furry feline was nowhere in sight, but she could hear the sound of purring from the toilet in her Memramcook, N.B., home.
“I hear this muffled meow, and I went of course, on a discovery ‘where is this little guy? thinking he’s just hiding somewhere, gotten himself into something,” said Martin.
That's when the panic began.
“My little kitten he got in behind the toilet somehow behind there, and there’s an entry that goes in, and there’s a wall, and in this wall there's a hole in it and he stuck his head in the hole,” Martin said.
Martin contacted a plumbing service for help.
“I was kind of confused,” said plumber Eric Lavigne. “Not sure what to expect with a cat caught in a toilet.”
Martin’s partner received a distress call as well and he was equally confused.
“Well at first, like everybody else, I laughed,” said Alain Clavette. “I thought ‘what do you mean, in the tank of the toilet? Or in the tank up top where the water is?’ I really did not understand.”
And so the rescue process began, with all hands on deck, but it wasn't going to be easy.
“We tried to actually butter the cat’s head, to try to push it out of the hole, but the cat was not having it,” said Lavigne.
The little fur ball was just out of reach, too, so Lavigne says his strategy was to remove the bolts of the toilet that were attached to the floor, and then work his way into the toilet from the bottom, rather than the top and potentially harm the kitten.
He successfully removed the toilet from the floor and a YouTube video reveals the cat’s predicament.
“This kitten has been stuck in the structure of that toilet and it's been over a few hours now and we think the problem was he could not push his body back out,” Lavigne says in the video.
The only way to get the kitten out of the toilet was to take him to the vet and sedate him.
“She had to put him under, and thankfully she had used some lubricant and it had only taken her a couple of seconds and thankfully she was able to get him out of the toilet,” Martin said.
Clavette said it was an interesting visit to the vet.
“Although it was a very dramatic time, the moment where I walk in the animal hospital with a toilet in my arms, with a cat inside the structure, I think I will remember that the rest of my life,” he said.
As for Spirit? He's in pretty good spirit, even though he's used up one of his nine lives.
With files from CTV Atlantic’s Kate Walker.
