A Silverton man says he made a disturbing discovery while driving to work Friday morning: A kitten that was apparently glued to the road, stuck in a busy lane of traffic.

It was around 7 a.m. and still fairly dark outside, so at first, Chuck Hawley couldn’t tell what was in the road in front of him on Silverton Road Northeast near Cordon Road Northeast, just outside of Salem.

At first, he thought it was a small box, but as he got closer he realized it was alive – a little kitten, frightened and cold.

“When I went to pick her up, her feet were stuck to the road, and I’m like uh oh. So I start to pull her feet up – and it was like a rubber cement, so she was glued to the road.” Hawley told our sister station in Oregon, FOX 12. “It was all under her neck and then she had a little bit down her side, but it was mostly her tail and her feet.”

There’s no way to know how long she’d been there, but Hawley believes it’s no accident.

“We were hoping that she had just walked through glue, but it was pretty apparent that somebody had soaked her feet in glue and sort of rubbed it into the pads of her feet,” he explained.

Based on what he saw, he believes whoever did it intentionally placed her in the middle of the traffic lane.

“I think the way she was sitting someone actually went out and put her there,” he said. “Because there were no glue foot prints around, it was just a glob of glue under her, so it looked like someone just took her and put her in the road.”

He took the 5-week-old kitten to the Silver Creek Animal Clinic, where staff had to use mineral oil to get the glue out. They also found puncture wounds on her neck but aren’t sure what caused them.

Dr. Jenny Bate examined the kitten and told our sister station in Oregon, FOX 12 she’s never seen anything like this before.

“I mean, what can you think when something like that happens? Your first reaction is disgust, and then what could cause a person to do something like that?” Bate said. “Somebody put that glue there, I don’t know how or why, but yeah, I mean, somebody did that.”

Hawley is filing a report with the Marion County Sheriff’s Office and hopes there are cameras in the area that might have caught the person responsible.

Luckily, the little kitten should make a full recovery.

Now that she’s been rescued, there’s a happy ending to this story: She’s going home permanently with Hawley.

“The funny thing is we were just talking about getting a cat a couple of night ago,” he said. “Seems like there’s easier ways for the cat to find us, but if that’s how we’re doing it, okay, I guess that’s how we’ll do it!”

The kitten’s new name?

“My wife named her Sticky!” he laughed.