After becoming trapped inside its owners suitcase, a feline from Ohio hitched a ride on an airplane bound for Florida. Destination: Fun and excitement courtesy of Disney World. According to the New York Daily News , the cat managed to survive the entire trip with all nine lives intact. Unfortunately for the furry stowaway, he’s not tall enough to ride Space Mountain.
Ethel Maze, who hails from a town near Columbus, takes a trip to the “Happiest Place on Earth” every year, though this is the first time her cat Bob-Bob tagged along for the ride. Maze still isn’t sure how the cat managed to sneak into the luggage without being spotted.
“We have a young man who helps out and gets our luggage ready and he said it looked like a suitcase was moving but he thought he was imagining things,” she said. “We had been up all night getting ready so we thought nothing of it.”
Bob-Bob, as you can imagine, was a little freaked out by the experience. “He was so frightened,” the cat’s owner said, explaining that her feline companion was probably stuck inside the suitcase for nearly 10 hours. “He hid for about seven hours in our hotel room and only in the middle of the night came out and started licking us and purring.”
The question remains: How did the cat manage to make it through security and luggage checks at the Port Columbus International Airport? ABC News reports that TSA representatives explained the problem away by stating that their equipment is designed to detect bombs, not furry stowaways.
“Our machines are very sensitive to picking up explosives and other threats to aviation,” Transportation Security Administration spokesperson Sari Koshetz explained to the Orlando Sentinel . Cats, apparently, don’t qualify as a threat.
Although Bob-Bob was understandably shaken up by his impromptu vacation to Disney World, his owner explained that the kitty is starting to feel better. “It’s really taken until today for him to get normal,” Maze said. “He’s still kind of shaky. Today is the first day he’s really eaten any canned food.”