A pilot who flew an emergency airlift of 145 shelter pets impacted by the devastating hurricanes in the US last week has adopted one of the animals he helped rescue.
Southwest Airlines Captain Matthew Prebish is now the owner of cat Avery after falling in love with her while flying the animals across the country.
The shelter pets were transferred from shelters in Tenessee and Florida to the LuckyDog South Carolina Rescue Campus in South Carolina and then flown to Wisconsin.
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The hope is the shelter pets will find homes in areas not impacted by Hurricanes Milton and Helene.
Avery was the first animal to find a new home thanks to Prebish, who was predicted to adopt one of the rescue pets, just not the one he chose.
“My wife said that she knew when I accepted this trip that I was probably going to come home with some sort of animal, she thought it was going to be a dog, but we now have another cat in the household and hopefully [Avery's] going to be done riding in crates for a while,” Prebish said.
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The pilot was won over by Avery's happy nature during the flight. He also felt that it was important to take one of the animals in seeing they're hoping others will do the same.
“I really admired her excitement of the world and her energy and she seemed to have a personality and caught my attention. You know here we are hoping to find these animals their forever homes and help them and I figured you know step up and take that step and do it ourselves so we decided to adopt Avery,” he said.
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Hurricane Helene caused huge devastation along the Florida coast last week, killing 230 people and an estimated US$50 billion in damage.
It was followed by Hurricane Milton, which at the time of writing had a death toll of 23 people, and caused more damage to Florida which was already reeling from the impact of Helene.
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