Kitten alone at home is afraid of workers, so owner quits her job

A woman who discovered what her kitten did when she was scared and home alone took drastic measures to be more there for her.

Lucy, who posts on TikTok under the name @countblabla, is the proud owner of black and white kitten Shy, who lived up to her name by escaping to a safe hiding place while workmen were on the property.

While Lucy was at work, she checked the cameras she had set up in her cats’ “favorite spots” to keep an eye on them. She noticed little Shy hiding in the closet with a toy mouse in her mouth while the landscapers were working outside.

“She sat there with her mouse for about 15 minutes and it was devastating to see that while I was at work,” Lucy said Newsweek. “Needless to say…I quit my 9-5 job shortly thereafter and took a job with more flexibility.”

In a clip shared on TikTok on June 18, cameras in Shy’s favorite spot show the kitten hiding in the closet with her toy in her mouth, looking around and listening attentively, never letting go of her comforting stuffed animal.

Lucy captioned the video: “They were gardening outside my window in my apartment complex. Shy took her mouse and sat in the closet like that for twenty minutes. I could cry.”

And she wrote in a caption peppered with crying emojis: “Please. The emotional support mouse. The one looking around. She’s in the dark.”

And TikTok users were collectively heartbroken. The video post, which received 271,000 likes, was filled with comments, one of which read: “This is why I have to be a stay-at-home cat mom.”

“No, it just made me realize that they get scared when I’m not here,” another shouted in all caps, while one said, “The baby is scared!”

Another pointed out Shy’s name, calling it “such a cute name,” to which Lucy replied that the kitten was “a little shy patient.”

She told Newsweek The video was taken when Shy was about two months old. The kitten “likes to hang out in the closet during the day, so she has her bed there, a little fort and a million toy mice.”

The apartment they lived in at the time had yard work done every Tuesday, and when Lucy checked a camera during her shift, “she was sitting there with her mouse and was quite brave.”

Although cats are known for their independence, owners should still consider certain things before leaving them alone, especially overnight. Expert Stephen Quandt of the Animal Behavior Institute previously said Newsweek that the length of time a cat can be left alone depends on the cat’s “age, temperament and medical history”.

Most cats can be left alone for a maximum of two nights, provided they have regular food supplies, he said. However, older, medicated or sick cats should never be left alone for that long.

Shy was found as a two-week-old kitten and placed in foster care before being put up for adoption. From then on, she became part of Lucy’s family and the younger sibling of Lucy’s first cat, Stevie, who recently passed away.

Of her beloved kitten, Lucy said that she is “really good” at playing fetch and that she usually “wakes me up by dropping her mice in my face.”

“But once I got used to it, she started dunking them in her drinking fountain and dropping wet, cold, squishy mice on me. Gross, but clever.”

“She’s gotten used to the landscapers and isn’t even afraid of storms! She likes to sit and watch them from her scratching post by the window.”

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