She stopped for coffee and left with the Honda disassembled because of an animal stuck in the car

A coffee stop ended with the front of a Honda dismantled in the drive-thru of a coffee shop in Ames, Iowa. The driver had just placed the order when she heard meows inside her own car and, when she turned off the engine, still in line, she discovered a kitten trapped behind the front grille.

The episode happened at the end of July, at a unit of the Scooter’s Coffee chain, during a heat alert issued by local authorities. The Ames animal shelter was called, but animal services agent Kathy Pike was unable to reach the animal from under the vehicle. It was necessary to call Central Iowa Towing and Recovery, a towing and removal company in the region.

Fifteen minutes and the front dismantled

Cole Denning and Jordan McKnight arrived with equipment that no coffee shop customer usually has on hand. After raising the Honda to examine the situation, they concluded that there was no alternative. “We both came to the conclusion that the only possible way to get it out was to disassemble the entire front of the car,” McKnight said.

The two carefully removed the parts around the hood and headlights until they made room to reach the kitten, who was breathing with difficulty and showing clear signs of suffering, according to the shelter’s post on social networks. The rescue took about 15 minutes. The front was then reassembled and the car continued its journey.

Hundreds of adoption requests

At the shelter, the kitten was named Fika — a Swedish word that describes the deliberate break for coffee or tea, in reference to the place where she appeared. The condition was more serious than it seemed: in an interview with local station We Are Iowa, the shelter said that the animal was “severely dehydrated and overheated” and classified the survival as a miracle. If the driver had not heard the meows at that moment, she evaluated, the kitten would not have resisted.

The case went viral and the shelter received hundreds of adoption requests. Fika, however, already has a defined destination: after being castrated, she will live with McKnight, one of the two professionals who dismantled the car to get her out of there.