“The lesson here is to never pick up a half-shaved, screeching and foaming hitchhiking cat, no matter how pathetic he or she may look.”That’s the lesson learned from an anonymous Hanover family after picking up a seemingly innocent kitten along a dark, rain swept Route 1 near the Delaware state line.
“We were driving up Route 1 in northeastern Maryland,” says the Hanover woman who picked up the stray, “and just before we entered Delaware we saw this poor kitten by the side of the road, thumbing a ride. He looked horrible, but he had the cutest little backpack and sign that said ‘will purr for food’. It was dark and raining, and I couldn’t drive past him, so I stopped and offered him a ride.”
Like a cute, bouncy Rutger Hauer, the kitten accepted the ride. But it wasn’t until the family and their rider arrived at a family reunion in Delaware that the ugly truth was discovered. “The kitten was a lunatic,” the anonymous compassionate woman told Newsfromdoswell, “The minute we arrived he went berserk, running amok through the food, scratching, clawing and defecating almost everywhere. No one could hold him, he would just spit and hiss and fight. One of the kids found a human finger in his French fries – it turned into a nightmare. No one could turn their back on that stupid kitten for fear of an attack or retribution of some sort. Then he disappeared.”
Eventually the kitten was located at a nearby truck stop, gunning the accelerator of an 18-wheeler with another cat tied as a “cat hitch” between it and another truck. “It was horrifying,” says Delaware trooper F.W. Jurgensen, “The kitten had ‘catnipped’ another cat and tied him between 2 trucks. We tried to talk him down, but he was just too angry. It ended badly.” Although the troopers arrested the manic kitten, it managed to elude its captors in the back of the animal control truck, escape from its cat carrier and pounce off the back bumper through the windshield of yet another family on their way to the reunion.
And, as a result of the angry cat attacks, a total of 17 people, including 8 Hanover County residents, have to get rabies shots.
“I don’t care how many hitchhiking kittens I see alongside the road, and I don’t care how desperate they may seem, or how cute their little signs are, I am through picking them up.” Says the Hanover woman, who is enduring a series of injections through the belly button for potential rabies infection. “The little kittens can just starve from now on.”
