JEFFERSON COUNTY, Colo. — A cat that escaped during the Quarry Fire is back with its owners.
It’s believed that the cat went missing for eight hours before it landed on the steps of an apartment covered in slurry. A neighbor noticed the hot pink cat and gave her a bath right away.
“So I came down my stairs, and she was just sitting politely down at the bottom of the stairs,” Rachel Cox said. “She rubbed against me with all her pink slurry all over her and she definitely dyed my clothes. My first instinct was to just wash her off immediately because I knew this was not right. So I did not get any pictures of her in the pink, I wish I did.”
She said she knew the cat was covered in slurry, a mixture of water and other ingredients dropped from aircraft to fight wildfires.
“Being right here, I had a suspicion right away,” Cox said.
Once the cat was clean, Rachel brought her new little friend to the Foothills Animal Shelter.
“Vitals looked great, she looked good, and she was very sweet and very chatty,” said Emmy VanLangevelde with Foothills Animal Shelter.
The only problem was they didn’t know the cat’s name.
“The attendant there just suggested “Slurry” and that stuck,” Cox said. “So that’s just what she was called.”
Slurry was reunited with her owners with the help of Facebook.
“We figured out her name is not Slurry, it is Ellie,” Cox said. “So Ellie or Elliot is her real name, but they will probably be calling her Slurry for short.”
Ellie is just as resilient as the community she lives in.
“This community has just been nothing but supportive of each other and helping each other during these hard, awful times we were going through,” Cox said. “And all of us just kind of bound together and luckily she found her way back home.”
“We would recommend that if any owners have concerns about maybe some potentially hazardous materials or substances that their pets come into contact with, to immediately reach out to their veterinary car provider,” VanLangevelde said. “Give them a little bath, or baby wipes are also a great resource.”
