Cat On Roof Of Speeding Van The Talk of Omaha: Watch The Video

OMAHA, NE — As a rule, cats don’t like car rides. It’s fair to say one in Omaha definitely didn’t. The poor thing was clinging for dear life — maybe for nine lifetimes — Friday night when Ronda Rankin’s daughter spied it on the top of a van traveling about 60 mph on Interstate 480.

Rankin posted a video of the spectacle on her Facebook page with the message, “So this happened yesterday on I-480.” More than 3,700 people have viewed it there, but it also was picked up by local and national news outlets.

When Rankin’s daughter told her there was a cat on the roof of the van, she thought instead that the gray and white animal was a raccoon. Was she ever wrong, she discovered when her husband pulled their vehicle closer.

“I’m like, ‘Oh my God, no that’s a cat,’ ” Rankin told Omaha television station KETV. “It looked really scared, like, ‘What the heck is going on?’ ”

The Rankins are kind souls. Her husband pulled up close to the van, honking the horn. “Pull over,” someone in the car said, according to the video.

“I said, ‘There’s a cat on your roof,’ and I keep saying, ‘A cat on your roof.’ Then, she looks at me and she’s like, ‘Oh my God.’ She looks startled, and so immediately the slowed down.”

The van pulled over and the Rankins drove on.

Rankin said on Facebook the cat was still on the roof when the driver of the van braked to a stop, “so I’m hopeful it ended well.”

The driver and the passenger, a middle-aged couple, seemed “shocked and scared” and didn’t find the situation funny at all, she said.

“The passenger seemed upset,” she wrote, guessing the cat may have been the couple's pet.

Mark Langan, the vice president for field operations for the Nebraska Humane Society, told KETV he’s “never seen a video like that before.”

“I mean how that cat held on at high speeds like that is amazing,” he said. “And I want to know what happened to the cat, people in Omaha want to know what happened to the cat, let's find out what happened to this poor cat.”

So far, the fate of the hapless feline is a mystery.

Here’s Rankin’s video:

File photo by pets in frames / Shutterstock