Turns out the kitten rescuer is a professional shooter.

As Robert Brantley was driving down the backroads of northeast Louisiana on Tuesday, something caught his eye. The professional shooter was going about 40 miles an hour as he headed toward the shooting range, but he thought he had seen a kitten on the side of the road.He wasn’t sure though, so he turned his car around and went back to find out. In a video that he posted to Instagram, Brantley walks toward a single white and gray tabby kitten.

“Look — kitty, kitty,” Brantley calls toward the kitten.

Brantley picks the kitten up just as three more white kittens pop up in the grass.
But it didn’t end there. In total, 12 kittens came out of the grass after the first one and ambushed the man who said he thought it was just a lone kitten.

“Oh, no, there’s a whole — oh, my gosh! I can’t take y’all. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh, there’s more! We got a kitten problem,” Brantley exclaims in his initial video. “Who would do this? I thought I was saving one. Hot diggity dog.”

Needless to say, Brantley had his hands full and did not make it to the range that day.

“I was not prepared for the kittens,” he told NPR. “I was just blown away.”

The 37-year-old said it was a wave of emotions as he realized someone had likely dumped the kittens on the side of the road at an age when they couldn’t fend for themselves.

Then he started the notably difficult task of herding the cats into his Honda hatchback.

“When I opened the door and started putting ’em in, they were jumping out. If I’d throw one in, three would run out,” he said. “But they would stay around my ankles on the ground. So I finally rolled down the windows, shut a door and started putting them inside where they couldn’t get out.”

Brantley then headed home with his baker’s dozen of kittens. The initial video gained a lot of traction on social media, and Brantley said thousands of offers for adoption started pouring in from all around the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.

At this time, most of the litter is spoken for, with the exception of a couple of kittens that need a little extra attention, and a veterinarian is scheduled to stop by Thursday night to help out.

“We found some good people locally that want ’em, and I know that they’re all good people and they’re not doing anything bad with them,” he said. “We haven’t gave any of them away yet — they’re probably a little too young.”

All together, “AHHH!”