Last Updated on April 14, 2026 by admin
The green Uber Eats bag was sitting under a bench near the Prospect Park loop in Brooklyn, half-hidden by dead leaves. It was zipped shut. From outside, it looked like someone’s forgotten lunch.
Inside were two cats — about a year old, pressed together so tightly their fur had matted at the seams. Their eyes were open. They didn’t move when the zipper came down.
A few metres away, a third cat — orange, young, visibly shaking — circled the grass near the same bench. She hadn’t run. She was still waiting near the bag, as if she expected someone to come back and put her inside it, too.
The Walk That Changed Direction
The people who found them weren’t looking for cats. They were mid-loop on a 5-kilometre charity walk through Prospect Park on a cool morning in March 2026. A handful of participants noticed the bag under the bench. One of them unzipped it.
What they saw stopped the walk.
Two of them were still curled together when the walkers unzipped the bag — pressed into each other like they knew no one else was coming.
The group didn’t leave them. They picked up the Uber Eats bag, scooped up the orange cat circling nearby, and carried all three for the remaining distance. For the next several kilometres, the cats rode along with the charity walkers, kept close and watched over instead of left behind in the grass.
Dana Heis Picked Up on the First Ring
Once the walk ended, someone in the group reached out to Dana Heis, a cat rescuer based in the New York area. Heis agreed immediately to take all three.
Within hours — not days, hours — she had them vaccinated, treated for fleas, and started on deworming medication. She checked each one over, confirmed all three were roughly a year old, and began making calls to her foster network.
Then she named them.
The two cats found inside the Uber Eats bag became Grubhub and Seamless. The orange cat who’d been circling the bench became DoorDash. Three cats pulled from a delivery bag, named after the apps that bag was supposed to carry.
“You’re safe now, babies,” Heis told them.
DoorDash Was the First to Land
Of the three, DoorDash — the orange one, the one who’d been pacing the grass alone — was placed with a long-term caretaker within hours of arriving at Heis’s intake space. Something about her drew people in fast. Maybe it was the pacing. Maybe it was the way she leaned into the first hand that touched her after the park.
Seamless and Grubhub moved into foster care together. They’d been found pressed against each other in that bag, and no one saw a reason to separate them now. Their foster family reported that for the first two nights, they slept in the same position they’d been found in — side by side, fur touching, eyes half-closed.
By the second week, Grubhub had started batting a crinkle ball across the kitchen floor at 6 a.m. Seamless preferred the windowsill. Both had started eating on schedule. Neither flinched when a door closed.
What Gets Left Behind
No one knows who put three cats in an Uber Eats bag and left them under a bench in Prospect Park. There was no note. No collar. No chip.
What is known is that roughly 3.2 million cats enter U.S. shelters every year, according to the ASPCA. Not all of them arrive through a front door. Some get left in boxes, crates, carriers — or, apparently, delivery bags.
The difference between a cat who ends up in a shelter database and a cat who ends up under a bench in Brooklyn is often just one person walking past at the right time. On that morning in March, a group of strangers on a charity walk happened to look down.
Three Cats, Three Names, One Bag
Grubhub and Seamless are still in foster care as of late March 2026. DoorDash is settled. All three are healthy, vaccinated, and no longer shaking.
They were found in a bag designed to keep someone’s pad thai warm. They came out of it with names that make people laugh — and a story that makes people stop scrolling.
The bag has been thrown away. The cats haven’t been.
Have you ever rescued or fostered a cat that showed up in a place no one expected? Tell us in the comments. 🐱