When Your Cat is Up a Tree

My favorite story as a child growing up was Pickles the Fire Cat. It started by firefighters rescuing a young, homeless cat from a tree. The cat later finds a home at the fire hall and eventually helps to save a kitten who climbed a tree so high even the fire fighters could not reach the kitten.

I have had the experience many times of one of my cats climbing a tree so high I could not reach them. But these were usually young cats chasing birds so I wasn’t too worried since they quickly came down after their prey left. The other day, however, I was inside working in my office when the one of the dogs in the neighborhood got loose. As I was looking out the window to see why the dog was barking in my front yard, I saw my 18-year-old cat scurry up a tree to safety. While this might seem like a good thing, I spent the next few hours trying to coax the old guy down. As I checked with my neighbors to find the longest ladder, one of them suggested we call the volunteer fire department. While my neighbor was kidding me that they would come since they don’t have much to do during the weekdays, my cat apparently didn’t like the idea of rescuers and came down the tree.

I was, however, wondering how often EMT’s, paramedics, and firefighters are called to rescue cats but I couldn’t find any statistics on this. I did, however see a few antecdotes on the internet about EMT’s getting calls to rescue a cat or saving a cat from a fire and then having to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation even though this not part of their training.  Luckily, I didn’t have to test the responsiveness of the local fire department and just as I had experienced before, if the cat can get up the tree it can get down without losing one of its nine lives.

While Sam Holden is not herding his cats, he finds web sites which accept guest posts.