A cat made a miraculous recovery after it survived a four-hour drive from Auckland to New Plymouth trapped in the grill of a car.
The cat wasn't discovered until the car was parked outside a New Plymouth hotel.
Passersby saw him and alerted staff who contacted North Taranaki SPCA and managed to safely extract him.
Jackie Poles Smith from the North Taranaki SPCA said the cat was hanging on so hard on the car's front grill space for the 360km trip that it lost some of its claws.
"We didn't know if he would survive. He was in an appalling state, he was severely hypothermic, he was so cold that his temperature didn't register on the vet's thermometers and they read down to 32 degrees," she said.
"He was severely shocked, luckily he wasn't injured apart from some claws where he'd been clutching on, and luckily he got himself jammed enough in the bottom of the grill that when he was too weak to hold on anymore he didn't fall off."
The SPCA are treating a cat after it survived a grilling four-hour drive from Auckland to New Plymouth. Photo: Facebook/North Taranaki SPCA
The SPCA called the cat's survival a 'miracle' on Facebook and treated his hypothermia by physically heating him up via heated pads and heated IV fluids
"That first night we didn't know if he was going to pull through but by the next day he was making really good progress," Ms Smith said.
Since the cat was not microchipped, the SPCA was now on the lookout to return him to his family who they assume were from Glenfield.
