Kittens travel from El Paso to Arizona under hood of car

A woman visiting her fiance at Fort Bliss last weekend, drove back to the Phoenix area this week, without realizing two kittens were stuck under the hood of her SUV.

Amazingly, they survived!

After a six-hour, more than 400-mile drive, the woman stopped in Chandler, Arizona. There, over the purring of her engine, she heard the kittens crying.

“It’s not uncommon, it really isn’t,” said Betty Hoover, executive director of the Humane Society of El Paso. “In these cold, frigid mornings and evenings we’ve been having, the cats are drawn to the warmth of those engines. They don’t see it as a hazzard. They think it’s a neat little maze they can crawl up into and get warm.”

Hoover said she’s heard plenty of stories about cats crawling under the hoods of cars. But traveling through three states under the hood of a moving car and surviving is a whole other thing for a cat, even if they do have nine lives.

“It’s very surprising to me that the cats survived,” she said. “They must have been terrified in there holding on for dear life. The reality is the wrong move could have cost them their lives.”

Or at least one of them!

After stopping at a Hyundai dealership in Chandler, the two cats were pulled one by one from the SUV after being nestled in the firewall area towards the passenger side. The driver said she stopped there for help after hearing the kittens “meowing like crazy.”

Hoover said if cats tend to get under someone’s hood often in the winter, they can always tap on the hood every morning to scare them away, or lift the hood and then drop it. She said that should startle them.

“Definitely, if you know there’s a cat up in there,” Hoover said, “that’s a very good method to get them to come out.”

A man at the dealership told ABC-7 a woman who works there took the kittens to a no-kill shelter.

The kittens have already been adopted. Their new names? Hitch and Hike!