Ron Stepinsky works as a farmer and shares some of his work life on TikTok. A recent video showed an event so impossibly rare it immediately got millions of views: He’d somehow wrapped a stray cat up inside a round bale of hay.
I’m not sure whether this poor gray cat is the world’s unluckiest kitty—or the luckiest. The downside is he somehow got scooped up by the John Deere 458 round baler’s forks. Then he got rolled up in a tightly compressed round bale. Finally, when the bale was ejected, he rolled across a field until it came to a stop. He was still firmly trapped inside.
That sounds like quite the nightmare. But here’s the thing: Many steps of the process could have killed him. The forks that lift the loose hay into the baler could have impaled the poor cat. The process of being wrapped tightly inside a bale could have killed him. If the cat had ended up at the center of the bale, he would have suffocated. Somehow, his head was sticking out one end enough to breathe—yet not far enough that the baler decapitated him when the bale rolled down the chute.
I’ve worked on a couple of farms and, to be blunt, I think I would have cut the bale open right then and there. Baling the hay up again would have made for more work, but I wouldn’t have wanted the cat trapped in the sun. Stepinsky says he was worried about the feral animal attacking him—which was a distinct possibility—so he left it and continued his work. Spoiler alert: When he returned, the cat had freed itself and disappeared. MotorBiscuit has reached out to @RonStepinsky for comment. You can see the original video embedded below:
