A one-month old kitten that ran underneath a truck on a busy road over the weekend has been adopted by the motorist who saved him in a rescue that was caught on dash cam.
The kitten, now named Jackpot, was saved by 28-year-old salesman Tam Yat-tung, who was driving towards Lion Rock Tunnel on a wet and rainy Saturday afternoon.
You can ignore the dash cam time stamp of 11pm on Jan. 7, by the way, Coconuts HK spoke to Tan, who said he’d simply forgotten to put in the correct time and date settings.
He posted dash-cam footage from his car onto a closed Facebook group for traffic-related updates on Saturday, which shows the moment Jackpot ran behind the wheels of a truck on its right-hand side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmLXFYcoEA4
“When I was entering the tunnel, I saw that something was crawling around the truck ahead, so I stopped and got off immediately to find it,” he told Coconuts HK.
The driver from the black Toyota in front of Tam also got out of his car to help, and both men told the driver of the truck to stop for a moment so that they could look for the animal.
Tam said that as this happened, tunnel staff appeared on the road to tell the drivers to get back into their vehicles, despite Tam explaining to them that there was a kitten underneath the truck.
Fortunately for Tam, the truck did not crush the cat, and he was able to rescue it and bring it back to his car.
Tam told Coconuts HK he decided to name the kitten Jackpot because he thought it was lucky that the kitten was rescued, and that it was fitting given that the driver of the black Toyota who helped rescue the cat had a registration plate with the numbers “777”, one often used to identify a jackpot on a slot machine.
After being bombarded with calls to set up a Facebook page giving updates on the kitten, Tam gave in and opened up a page called “Jackpot – Below the Lion Rock,” a nod to where Jackpot was found –and to a song of the same name about Hongkongers’ “can do attitude” aka “the Lion Rock spirit.”
“By running this page, I want to send the message to others that an animal is as equally valuable as a human being,” he told us. “We should not abandon them.”
Tam confirms Jackpot was bruised when he was rescued, but did not sustain any serious wounds, and is due to have a full check-up from a veterinarian today.
Jackpot is not the only kitten recently rescued from underneath a vehicle in Hong Kong. In May, firefighters and police officers rescued a 4-month-old kitten after it crawled underneath a tram in Central, causing traffic to grind to a halt.
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