Kitten rescued on I-696 finds forever home

HUNTINGTON WOODS/ROYAL OAK — A late September day for a volunteer animal foster parent turned out to be a lucky one for a newborn kitten.

Clawson resident Susan Rabaut, a foster kitten caregiver with Pet Adoption Alternative of Warren, already was on the job Sept. 29 when she was traveling on Interstate 696. She had three kittens in her vehicle and was on her way to All About Animals Rescue for a vet appointment when she noticed a small black kitten run across highway traffic.

“I didn’t want him to get hit, and I knew that he would probably die quickly,” she said. “So I pulled my car over and got out, and I was able to grab him as he was running, starting to run up the wall. And he was super terrified, of course.”

Rabaut was able to get the kitten into her vehicle and took him to the vet, where he was checked out and found to be OK.

The kitten was handed over to another volunteer at PAAW, Tresse Roby. The kittens that Rabaut was taking to the vet had come from a litter that she split with Roby.

Roby, a Huntington Woods resident, had lost a black cat of her own the year prior and decided to take in the new kitten, who was named Mouse. Roby said she knew the night that Mouse came to her home that she wanted to keep him.

“I kind of had my eye out looking for a black kitten to adopt,” she said. “I knew it was fate that he came along. … He’s been with me ever since. And he’s doing amazing. He was so terrified. I mean, how could you not be? It took him almost a week before he really started coming out of his shell.”

Rabaut said that either she or Roby was going to take the kitten in, and Mouse found a great home with Roby.

“I feel so lucky and thankful that I got to save his life,” she said. “It warms my heart. That’s what I do the fostering for, and that was a very direct way to save an animal. So I felt good about that.”

Roby doesn’t know if Mouse was feral, but he appeared to have been owned by someone, as his claws had been trimmed. She said it was possible that someone had Mouse and threw him out of a car on the highway.

“That’s really the only way he could have gotten there,” she said. “He probably wasn’t feral, but he was really scared, and it took him a while before he let me pick him up and everything. He just wouldn’t make eye contact and would shake. He would be so scared of me. And so when his guard started to let down and he purred, it was like a moment.”

Mouse has been in Roby’s care for a month now. He’s been getting his vaccines and has turned from a terrified kitten who wouldn’t eat into a playful, cuddly feline.

“He wasn’t very healthy, and I was worried he would have failure to thrive and maybe not make it, but he is, like, such a healthy, normal kitty now. He follows me around everywhere. He’s still kind of shy of other people, but he’s definitely a mama’s boy.”