Published Jun 1, 2026
Image Credit: Humane Society of North Texas
A gray tabby kitten named Elmer, who made national headlines after a dramatic rescue from a vat of glue in Fort Worth, Texas, ended up finding his forever home in the woman who fostered him: Leah Owens. But he sure came from a sticky situation!
“He is all kitten – rambunctious!” Leah, 72, says in an interview with Cats. “He’s a little loverboy.”
The ordeal started in late April, when a Good Samaritan discovered the tiny, 4-week-old kitten in a bucket of industrial-strength glue in an industrial area of the city. He lifted the kitten out of the mess and rushed to the nearby Humane Society of North Texas (HSNT), where the shelter was just closing down and staff members were about to head home for the day. Then, the man started beating on the door with a mass in his hands: a kitten covered head to toe in a very sticky glue. The baby was so bound in the adhesive that he couldn’t even move his front legs.
“It’s a cat! I found this cat!” the rescuer told the shelter staff, who immediately took in the kitten and got to work at saving his life.
Image Credit: Humane Society of North Texas
Image Credit: Humane Society of North Texas
Image Credit: Humane Society of North Texas
Image Credit: Humane Society of North Texas
Cassie Davidson, spokeswoman for the HSNT, said the staff was not sure the tiny baby would make it through the night, due to blocked airways from the glue and likely ingestion of the toxic substance. Medical staff members tried many substances to remove the glue, including mineral oil, olive oil, and blue Dawn dish soap. Nothing worked – until someone brought in a bottle of canola oil, and that did the trick in penetrating the glue, mostly still wet but dried up in some spots on the fur. The dried spots were later shaved off, after the fur grew.
Seven people spent hours massaging the canola oil into the fur of the kitten, who was a trooper and a little fighter who lapped up Churu treats during the treatment. After seven hours, most of the glue was gone, Cassie says. The kitten went home with a staff member, then returned to the shelter for medical observation – and he expected daily massages, Cassie says. It was time to send him to foster care, and volunteer Leah stepped up to take him home for socialization.
Leah – who read about Elmer in the local newspaper, and reached out to the shelter to ask to foster the kitten – quickly fell in love with the little fellow, and this realization hit her when she took Elmer back to the shelter for his neuter surgery. Leah’s husband, Roger, had died in October 2025 from multiple myeloma, and this little cat had brought so much joy to Leah during her time of grief. She was attached! Leah got her picture taken with Elmer, so she’d have something to remember him by if she didn’t get to be the lucky adopter.
Image Credit: Humane Society of North Texas
“I was crazy about him,” Leah says.
Yet the kitten had already become a viral sensation with news coverage, and the shelter got about 250 calls in just one day from people near and far who wanted to adopt him. The shelter staff set up an e-mail just for people to express interest in adopting Elmer.
Though she had already fostered Elmer, Leah went through the same process as other potential adopters. She walked out to the parking lot and wrote the email from her phone, talking about how Elmer made her laugh and smile after losing her husband. Workers at the shelter were so moved by Leah’s email, Davidson says, that they knew picking her as Elmer’s mom was the right thing to do.
Leah, who lives in the Fort Worth suburb of Azle, initially kept Elmer in her sunroom to give him space from her three other cats: Poppy, Tarzana, and senior Ricky. The kitten showed a playful curiosity from the beginning, when he still had a few dried glue spots, and he started sniffing everything in the room. The glue smell was gone, and a fluffy, sweet kitten remained.
Image Credit: Humane Society of North Texas
“He was just an affectionate little thing,” Leah says, “He’d crawl up on my chest, pad my face, and bite my lip.”
Elmer loves playing with Poppy, a one-eyed cat who enjoys wrestling with her little brother, who is fully integrated into the household. Elmer sleeps with Leah and likes to put his head into her neck.
We don’t know how Elmer’s ended up in that bucket of glue – whether he fell into it accidentally, or a sadistic person put him in there. Most likely, it’s the former, Cassie says.
“He was probably just a little curious kitten who ended up falling in,” she says. “We’ve had cats that have fallen upon … precarious situations. Cats are cats; they do things… but we’d never had a cat that was in industrial glue.”
No matter how Elmer’s awful ordeal happened, he ended up at his forever home with his forever person, so all is well that ends well. May Elmer’s case serve as a guide to future emergency veterinarians, who will keep canola oil handy in case a glue-covered cat arrives.
