Coco
It is painful when I fail at a rescue. I can deal with the blow to my ego, but when it is the cat that suffers the consequences, the pain is deep, it lingers long, and I feel terrible guilt. This time it was Coco, a sweet gray and white female kitty, who was the victim of my failure. It all ended well; she is out of the tree and doing just fine. But as a result of my rescue attempt, she experienced the scare of falling 30' to the ground. Coco had spent three nights in a tall, dying tree with a dead top, and the middle wasn't looking very good either. When I arrived, she was about 12' out on a large dead branch that was about 30' from the ground. There was only one healthy branch that I could use to anchor my rope, and it was only 10 feet higher than Coco's branch. While Coco is a tame, pet cat, she is skittish with strangers, so I was concerned that she would try to climb higher in the tree when she saw me approaching. If she climbed h...