September 8, 2026

A cat who accidentally ended up at a landfill after being thrown away with an old couch is back home with his family, thanks to a group of people who refused to let his incredible journey end in tragedy.

Neal (right) / Credit: WRAL

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 simply didn’t come home for dinner.

For two days, he searched the neighborhood, walking around with a bag of treats and calling Mike’s name. He even checked near the sewers, but there was no sign of him.

Then he remembered something that made his stomach sink. His family had recently gotten rid of three couches.

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

Unfortunately, his suspicion appeared to be correct.

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

That meant Mike could be somewhere inside a massive waste facility, surrounded by machinery and trash, with very little chance of surviving.

Then, someone spotted him.

Mauricio Martinez, a heavy equipment operator at the landfill, noticed a frightened cat trapped down 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 15 feet above the asphalt. There wasn't enough room for Mike to jump to safety.

So the landfill workers came up with a plan. They positioned a loader bucket beneath the ledge and carefully encouraged Mike to climb aboard.

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

Mike was finally out of the pit, but apparently he wasn't quite ready to surrender his freedom.

He managed to get away from the landfill crew and crawled through a tunnel into a storage room, turning his rescue into another search mission.

Animal control eventually caught Mike and transferred him to a nearby shelter, where he was finally 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.