Six people spend three days saving kitten stuck in industrial-strength glue

A kitten in Salem, Oregon, appears to have used one of its nine lives after becoming stuck in epoxy glue at a downtown garage. It took six people nearly three days to work on saving Ace the kitten, whose lower body and legs were stuck together by the industrial-strength glue. A worker with Salem Friends of Felines took the kitten to the Willamette Valley Animal Hospital to get all that epoxy glue off of him. “I’ve been doing this for quite a few years, and this is a first,” said Joshua Braden of Willamette Valley Animal Hospital.



It’s not known how the 10-week-old kitten ended up in the glue. “He got scared and started to struggle and every time it struggled, it buried itself more and more into the epoxy,” said Braden. Firefighters helped cut the kitten out, but no one knew how to deal with all the glue or how to get it off. “Its front feet were basically glued up, so there was no moving, no walking or anything like that,” said Braden. Penny Mack, from Salem Friends of Felines, said she called Ace Hardware trying to find something that could help remove the glue.

She said most of the ideas would have meant using strong chemicals on the kitten, but no one wanted to do that. “I was amazed how badly stuck he was,” Mack said. At Willamette Valley Animal Hospital, veterinarian Dr. Laura Magruder started to carefully and slowly shave off the kitten’s hair that was covered in glue. Magruder and her staff worked on the kitten for several hours over a three-day period.


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“Our staff was holding it as the doctor removed the epoxy and the kitten didn’t fight it, he didn’t struggle. It was like he knew what we were doing was going to help,” added Braden. Ace still has some glue stuck on his toes and some on his chest. The vet hopes that once more hair grows in, they’ll be able to remove those patches, but until then, Ace is slowly recovering. The manager of the Ace Hardware store in Salem, who helped try and come up with a solution to remove the glue, has decided to adopt Ace.