An old couch nearly became the end of Mike’s story. Instead, it led to a rescue at a landfill and a reunion with the family cat’s owner.

Mike, an 8-year-old domestic short hair, had been part of Neal Augenstein’s family for more than six years. Then one evening, Mike did not come home for dinner.

For two days, Augenstein searched the neighbourhood with a bag of treats and called Mike’s name. He also checked near the sewers, but found no sign of him.

Then he remembered his family had recently gotten rid of three couches.

“I was having a sinking feeling that the cat was in the couch,” he said.

By the time Augenstein went looking for the discarded couch, it had already been transported to a landfill.

At the landfill, heavy equipment operator Mauricio Martinez spotted a frightened cat trapped in the trash pit.

“And he seems scared,” Martinez recalled. “And he was, like, trapped. And it was a big drop.”

Mike was stranded on a ledge about 4.5 metres above the asphalt. There was not enough room for him to jump to safety.

Landfill workers positioned a loader bucket beneath the ledge and encouraged Mike to climb aboard.

“It took us about 10 minutes to get the cat down,” said Joshua Murphy, assistant superintendent at the landfill.

After that, Mike got away from the landfill crew and crawled through a tunnel into a storage room. Animal control later caught him and transferred him to a nearby shelter, where he was reunited with Augenstein.

“There were so many hands touched Mike, and there were so many places where things could have gone very badly, but things turned out perfectly, and I’m delighted to have him home,” Augenstein said.

“Just an amazingly happy ending, and I’m so thankful to everyone who played a part in it,” he said.

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