Cat Rescue Guy

Cinnamon was one tough cookie. He wasn't spicy, but he was calmly defiant like a statue that could not be budged. He was 60 feet high and far out at the end of a long, arching branch of a very large oak tree where I could not go. I was about 10 feet from him, and we had a long, friendly standoff while I waited for him to come to me and he waited for me to leave. I'm a very patient rescuer because cats often need a long time to see that I am not a threat. I am so patient that the cat owners sometimes get bored and tired and go inside to wait for me to finish. I was patient with Cinnamon too, but Cinnamon was more patient than I was. In the standoff and patience game, Cinnamon won. Cinnamon is a two-year-old orange tabby boy who was stuck in a tree in Leonville, Louisiana for five nights. Silly me. I thought his rescue would be easy. He was originally stuck on a short, dead stub about 30 feet high in a tree in a long line of fence-line trees between a corn field and a long, hard-...

Nala desperately needed help. This six-month-old kitty was stuck at least 40 feet high in a tree at the edge of a wooded area next to a used car lot in Albany, Louisiana, and she cried out constantly and loudly for help. Her family was down below talking to her, but they did not appear to be helping her down at all. She spent the night in the tree, and her family was back there the next morning talking to her again, but they still did not help her down. They walked around, talked to each other, and went out of sight for long periods of time, but they didn't do anything to help her. Nala continued to cry out for help, but no one appeared to care, and, again, she spent another hopeless night in the tree. Nala could not know it, but her family was feeling just as desperate as she was, and they were trying very hard to figure out a way to help her down. I could hear how desperate and worried they were when they called me, and I went over there right away. Nala was as ready as she could...

One thing I have learned about cat owners when their cat gets stuck in a tree is that they tend to exaggerate the length of time the cat has been stuck. If the cat was stuck one night, they call it two days because the cat went up at the end of one day and was still there the next morning even though the total elapsed time was much less than 24 hours. When the cat has been stuck three nights, the owners feel it has been a week. If the cat was stuck a week, they call it two weeks. I do not blame or fault them one bit because time truly drags slowly when you're stressed about the cat, and the time period most certainly feels much longer than it actually is. I'm sure I would do the same, but t o understand the cat I am about to rescue, I need to know the actual length of time, so, in addition to asking  how long the cat was in the tree, I also ask for more details to get them to think about it more precisely so I can learn if they are exaggerating or not. When I asked Amanda how l...

It was time for another loop trip to rescue two kitties in the same general area. Both kitties were young, female gray tabbies, and both were stuck in a tree for five or six nights. The first stop was for Muffin. We don't know how Muffin ended up deep in the woods so far from her rural home, but this little girl who is not even one year old yet is lucky to be alive and even more lucky that her family found her. She climbed about 50 feet high near the top of a skinny Pine tree, probably to escape a predator, and she was stuck there for five nights. It is only the most caring and determined of people who would find her so far from home, but that is exactly what Muffin had in her family, and they tried very hard to help her down. Muffin's situation was a tricky one. Another nearby tree of similar size had fallen into Muffin's tree and was resting there against it. The tree was being held there primarily by one small limb which was pressed against the Pine stem. If that limb br...

One of my favorite ways to secure a cat in a tree before taking him back down to the ground and back home is to use what I call the lap bag. It's just a large, fabric bag like a laundry bag, and I simply spread the bottom of the bag over my lap and gather the sides of the bag around my lap. Once the cat steps on my lap, I simply raise the sides of the bag up around him. There is no rough, forcible handling of the cat, and the cat is not traumatized or even bothered by it at all. Once in the bag, he is usually calm, and he stays relaxed until he is released back home. Raising the sides of the bag around the cat does not alarm them. I suspect that if I were to jerk the bag up very quickly, the cat would reflexively jump up to escape, and given how fast cat reflexes are, he would likely succeed. Pulling the bag up slowly and gently, however, does not alarm them at all, so I never have any trouble keeping them in the bag. That is, until I met Luna, a one-year-old tortie who was stuck i...