A cat that was stuffed in a bag and tossed out of a vehicle on a Winnipeg bridge is now recovering in a foster home.

Cherie Smith, assistant manager at Rescue Siamese, said the incident happened at around 5 p.m. Thursday, when a woman was driving with her daughter across the Harry Lazarenko Bridge, also known as the Redwood Bridge. They saw someone in the vehicle ahead of them toss a bag out the window, which hit the guardrail on the bridge and fell to the ground.

When the woman's daughter noticed the bag was moving, they stopped and opened it, finding a young Siamese cat inside. The woman then contacted Rescue Siamese, a local volunteer cat rescue organization.

"It is absolutely terrible. We're super thankful to this woman and her daughter for contacting us," said Smith. "We had a volunteer go and get this cat right away and take it to the vet to make sure that he didn't have any internal injuries or any other trauma."

Other than some bruising and a wound on its tail which required a suture, the approximately one-year-old cat — which has been named Duke Kaboom — was found to be healthy and discharged from the vet.

The woman who found it filed a police report, but so far there have been no leads about the person who threw the cat out of the vehicle, Smith said.

"It's just absolutely heartbreaking that people would go instead of trying to find the cat a home they would rather harm it by doing this," she said.

This isn't the first time the group has heard of someone trying to get rid of a cat by throwing it out of a vehicle.

"We've had at least three, if not four, situations in the last two years where a cat's been tossed out the side of a car," Smith said. "We had a litter of kittens left on the median in a box where there was traffic all over the place. So there's quite a bit of it."

Duke Kaboom will be monitored at home for a few days and taken back to the vet for further assessment. Once he has been neutered, if needed, and all his vaccinations are up to date, he will be put up for adoption.