Kara Tiller was taking a walk in her neighborhood when she noticed something unusual that stopped her in her tracks. She saw a mother and daughter bent over a rain gutter, peering inside. When she asked them what they were looking at, they said they’d been hearing a kitten meowing for help from deep inside the gutter for several days.
They decided to call the fire department, who quickly came to the kitten’s rescue. But getting the kitten out from the gutter proved to be more difficult than expected. Even after hours of trying to coax the kitten out of the gutter, she was still trapped.
“We tried food, YouTube videos of cat sounds — the cat was completely stuck,” Tiller said in a TikTok.
Eventually, the firefighters were able to flush the kitten out of the gutter with water from a fire hose. Once she was safely brought to the surface, the kitten could not stop meowing.
After Tiller posted a TikTok about her experience, many people in her comments were hoping that Tiller had decided to take in the rescued cat.
“You better keep that kitten[!]” one commenter wrote.
The next day, Tiller posted an update to her TikTok account. To everyone’s delight, the new video revealed that Tiller did, in fact, decide to keep the kitten. After being there for her entire rescue journey, it would’ve been impossible not to.
Tiller decided to name the kitten Juniper. Juniper is so small that she fits in the palm of Tiller’s hand.
“We couldn’t get over how tiny she is,” Tiller said.
Tiller took Juniper straight to the vet. The vet determined that little Juniper was only 4 weeks old. Normally, kittens nurse for at least 8 to 10 weeks, so it’s a miracle that she’d survived for so long without food.
Incredibly, despite having been trapped in a gutter for days, Juniper didn’t have any major health concerns and was cleared to go home with Tiller.
“[She’s] super healthy and very happy,” Tiller said.
Tiller emphasized that this is only the beginning of her and Juniper’s journey.
“I think we needed each other,” Tiller wrote on TikTok.
