For 60 days, this cat survived on the 7th floor of a destroyed building in Ukraine
‘Of all the animals we’ve rescued, I still don’t understand how this cat survived,’
Field producer Kate Parunova was working in Borodyanka, Ukraine, when she spotted something moving on the seventh floor of a building that had been destroyed 60 days earlier.
It was a cat.
"You have to understand that the whole staircase from that part of the building was demolished," she said in the documentary Saving the Animals of Ukraine. "So there was no chance for the animal to get down."
It seemed impossible that a cat would have been able to survive for so long without food and water. But when Dmitry Revnyuk and volunteers from the Kyiv animal rescue Zoopatrol arrived, they used a drone and confirmed it.
"Now we had to figure out how to get up that high," he said in Ukrainian. "We immediately contacted the ministry of emergency services."
The responding crew used the ladder of their fire truck to get to the seventh floor. As soon as they reached the cat, it climbed into their arms.
"That was like a real rescue operation, and to be honest, I'm so proud of my country and my people," Parunova said.
"I came to them and said, 'Look guys, I'm so grateful that, having so much disaster and misery around you right now with people, you find time to help animals.'
"And he replied to me, 'We don't care if it's an animal or a human being. We're a rescue service, and every life matters to us.'"
The cat had a 40 per cent chance of survival, but despite the odds, she recovered and was reunited with her owner.
Watch Saving the Animals of Ukraine on CBC Gem.
