A pair of kittens halted two New York subway lines for nearly two hours Thursday while police and transit authority officials rescued the animals from the tracks.
The 4-week-old cats, later named Arthur and August, were spotted in Brooklyn after 11 a.m. near Church Avenue, and officials to cut power to the B and Q lines. After one unsuccessful attempt, police went onto the tracks to pursue the felines.
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"The announcer said it had to stop to rescue some cats," passenger Sandra Polel, 52, told the New York Daily News. "I didn't mind. I wanted to get home, but I also wanted the kittens to be safe."
Full service was restored shortly after 1 p.m., but the kittens weren't secured until nearly five hours later, when two police officers and a Metropolitan Transit Authority worker finally corralled the cats near the third rail.
"One of the officers then had an insulated glove," onlooker Letitia Delacorte Spangler, 31, told the Daily News. "He just scooped them out, despite all escape tactics."
The kittens were sent to a local animal shelter for tests.
"I'd say it's a relief, relief and joy," one of the rescuers, Transit Officer and cat owner Jason Bolger, told the paper.
Maybe there's something to that nine lives thing after all. In April, a kitten suffered minor injuries after being thrown from a third-story window in Yonkers, N.Y.,
during a domestic dispute, the Daily News reported.
The paper also said that in June, a 3-week-old kitten survived a 1,000-mile trip from Oregon to Santa Barbara, Calif., after it was trapped in a car engine.
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