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"This was seven in the morning, so there's a lot of cars coming down here," Chuck Hawley told KPTV. "And just the fact she wasn't hit was amazing."
Hawley was driving to work when he saw something in the middle of the road. He couldn't tell what it was at first, and he saw several cars pass right over it.
His heart immediately sank when he realized the little kitten was alive, but very frightened and cold.
"When I went to pick her up, her feet were stuck to the road, and I'm like uh-oh," he said. "So I start to pull her feet up, and it was like a rubber cement. She was glued to the road."
The glue was on all four paws, under her neck and covering her tail.
"We were hoping that she had just walked through glue, but it was pretty apparent that somebody had soaked her feet in glue and kind of rubbed it into the pads of her feet," Hawley said.
He took the kitten, which was later learned to be only five weeks old, to the Silver Creek Animal Clinic, where veterinarians had to use mineral oil to get the glue out.
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They also found some puncture wounds on her neck, but they aren't sure what caused them.
Dr. Jenny Bate said she has never seen anything like this before.
"I mean, what can you think when something like that happens?" she said. "I mean, your first reaction is disgust, and then thinking what could cause a person to do something like that."
There's no doubt in her mind either this was no accident.
"It had to happen intentionally," she said. "I mean, somebody put that glue there, I don't know how or why or anything, but yeah, I mean, somebody did that."
There's no way to know how long the kitten was left in the road, and it's incredible that she wasn't run over. But now that she's been rescued, there's a happy ending to this story -- she's going home permanently with Hawley.
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"The funny thing is we were just talking about getting a cat a couple of nights ago," he said. "Seems like there's easier ways for the cat to find us, but if that's how we're doing it, okay, I guess that's how we'll do it."
Hawley's wife gave the kitty the name, Sticky. Of course, it's fitting given what she's been through.
Sticky is expected to make a full recovery.
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