Tiny kitten rescued from rubble after Mississippi tornado, video shows

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A faint meow in the rubble of a Mississippi tornado helped lead a storm chaser to a kitten that appeared to have survived the destruction. Ashton Lemley was picking his way through a trailer park damaged by the storm when he noticed the sound in the predawn darkness, The Associated Press reported.

The kitten’s distress call came as Lemley worked near homes that had been flattened just hours earlier, after storms spawned at least three tornadoes across the bottom half of Mississippi, injuring a dozen people at the trailer park in the rural community of Bogue Chitto, according to the report.

Lemley said he did not initially know where the kitten was. After the meowing stopped, he feared the worst, but then heard it again about five minutes later, giving him a new focus in the debris field.

“I said, ‘Oh, he’s still alive!’” Lemley told The Associated Press on Thursday. He then dug under insulation from a flattened wall until his flashlight beam found the kitten, wet and scared, hiding between two wooden posts.

The report said Lemley recorded the moment on video. In the footage, Lemley can be heard telling the kitten, “Oh my goodness, I found him!” and reassuring it that it was “OK” before saying, “We’ll get you cleaned up, baby. Don’t you worry.”

After holding the kitten in his arms for a few minutes, Lemley handed it off to the commander of the United Cajun Navy, a volunteer disaster-response group. The commander dried the kitten off and took it to safety, and Lemley said it did not appear to be injured.

Lemley told The Associated Press that he has been chasing storms since 2010 and said he tries not to become overly emotional in those situations. He said it is “very heartbreaking” to see animals or people go through what he described as the kinds of events that follow tornado damage.

Lemley also said there was already interest from people who wanted to adopt the kitten if its owners could not be located, and that some of those interested wanted to name it Tornado. He added that it would not come home with him because he is allergic to cats.