Last Updated on August 31, 2026 by admin
On the night of July 28, rescue workers were pulling bodies out of the El Jurel residential complex in Playa Grande, Venezuela. The building had come down thirty-four days earlier. Nobody was looking for survivors anymore.
Then someone heard a cat.
Ten floors up, inside a pocket of the collapsed tower that had somehow held its shape, a cat named Nino was still alive. He had been in a closet the whole time.
Thirty-four days in the one place every cat goes
Two earthquakes, magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, hit Venezuela on June 24, 2026 — among the strongest the country has recorded in more than a century. More than 5,300 people died. Nearly 18,000 were left without homes, according to Humane World for Animals, whose disaster team deployed to La Guaira in the weeks afterward.
La Guaira took the worst of it. Apartment towers folded floor onto floor. Nino’s building was one of them.
When the shaking started, he did what your cat would do. He went into the closet.
Every cat owner knows this behavior. The vacuum comes out, the doorbell rings, a suitcase appears — and the cat is gone, wedged behind the winter coats, silent, refusing to come out until the world seems normal again. It looks like cowardice. It is actually one of the oldest survival instincts a small predator has: find the enclosed space with one entrance and wait.
That instinct is why Nino was in the only part of a ten-story apartment that didn’t crush.
Rescuers weren’t searching for anything alive
By late July, the operation in Playa Grande had officially shifted from search-and-rescue to recovery. Crews were there to bring families their dead.
Mexican rescuer Jorge Diaz was working the El Jurel site with volunteers from Topos USAR BREC Mexico, climbers from the Central University of Venezuela, and members of the Venezuelan group Ayuda para la Vida. They detected signs of life under the debris — inside a collapsed apartment they had already written off.
Reaching him meant a vertical descent into an unstable structure. Concrete and twisted rebar came out by hand, slowly, because moving the wrong slab could bring the rest down on everyone.
Nobody on that rope knew whether they were digging toward a cat that would survive the next hour.
“Nino, is that you?”
When they got to him, they called his owner from the rubble.
She could not process it. In video of the call published by ColombiaOne, she says: “Oh my God. It can’t be. Nino, is that you?”
She needed proof. So a firefighter described the cat in his arms — a small patch of fur missing from the right side. She asked him to check for a mark near one of Nino’s eyes.
He checked. It was there.
“We’re going to take him to the veterinarian,” the rescuer told her.
What thirty-four days does to a nine-pound animal
Video taken after the rescue shows Nino unable to stand on his own. Dehydrated. Wasted down to frame and fur. Veterinarians examined him and found severe dehydration and malnutrition — and, remarkably, no life-threatening injuries. No crush wounds. No broken spine. He got fluids, then food, then went home.
Here is what makes that outcome extraordinary, and it is worth knowing if you own a cat.
Cats are unusually bad at going hungry. When a cat stops eating, its liver starts breaking down body fat for energy, and the feline liver handles fat poorly. Fat accumulates inside the liver cells themselves. The condition is called hepatic lipidosis, and it can turn fatal in a matter of days.
“Hepatic lipidosis seems to be a peculiar metabolic response of cats, particularly those that are overweight, to a reduction in food intake,” Dr. David Williams, an internal medicine specialist at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine, told the college’s pet health column. “Once the cat gets hepatic lipidosis, the cat will not usually start eating again on its own.”
His advice to owners is blunt: if your cat stops eating for multiple days, that is not a mood. That is a vet visit.
Nino went thirty-four days. He came out the other side.
He wasn’t the only one down there
A dog named Beyli was pulled from another collapsed building after 29 days trapped, and also reunited with his owner. More than 140 animals were recovered during the emergency response, with over 60 treated for dehydration, injury and infection.
Much of that care happened inside a McDonald’s. The restaurant was one of the few structures in La Guaira that stayed sound, so responders converted it into a makeshift veterinary clinic — locals started calling it Hospital McDonald’s. Humane World for Animals and its Venezuelan partner Red de Apoyo Canino treated 1,710 animals in eighteen days, working out of that building and five displacement camps run by the UN’s International Organization for Migration.
Felipe Márquez Muñoz, who managed the deployment, wrote about a man whose apartment collapsed and whose wife died in it, her remains still unrecovered. What he asked the rescue team for was help catching his cats. They left him two humane traps. That night he messaged to say one cat was home.
Where Nino is now
He is with his owner. Rehydrated, fed, checked over, and — going by the woman who recognized him by a patch of missing fur and a mark near his eye — not likely to be out of her sight for a while.
His rescue was one of the last live recoveries from the El Jurel site.
Somewhere in your house right now there is a closet with a cat in it, and it looked like nothing but a nuisance until today.
Does your cat have a hiding spot? Tell us where it is in the comments 👇