Cat Rescue Guy

After a long, exhausting rescue the day before, I was hoping for a quiet day to recover and rest, so I was very disappointed when my phone rang before 9:00 AM with news of another kitty in need. April called me desperately seeking help for her cat, Gracie, and it sounded like a very bad situation. The tree is in a wild, wooded area and next to a deep ravine, and Gracie has been stuck there for six, hot July days. To make matters worse, Gracie is pregnant. It was a long drive to this poor, rural location, and shortly before I got there, I got a text message from April saying that she could not see or hear Gracie anymore. I called her right away to discuss this further, but April was crying and could barely speak.  She assumed that Gracie had fallen and died, but I tried to reassure her that it is more likely that Gracie just moved to a different part of the tree as cats often do. I told her to continue searching for Gracie and let me know when she finds her. I would be there shortly...

I was getting conflicting information from the family about Charlie's disposition, but as long as at least one person says that Charlie is friendly and likes to sit on your lap, then I figure I have a good chance at befriending this four-year-old, orange tabby boy. Charlie was stuck in a tall Pine tree in his backyard in Gonzales, Louisiana for four hot, July days, and his family had been frantically trying to find a way to get him down. When I arrived, Charlie was about 35 feet high in the tree, and I was expecting a routine rescue. It is almost standard practice for me to set a rope very high in the tree even if the cat is very low, and there are three reasons for that: (1) Installing my rope in the tree causes some noise and disturbance in the tree which usually frightens most cats, so the farther away the cat is from that disturbance, the less frightened he will be. (2) If the cat stays low but goes far out on a limb to get away from me, then having my rope set high makes it ea...

Cats can get stuck in trees, of course, but they can also get stuck on a roof, especially if they climbed a tree to get there. They simply walk out a limb overhanging the roof and jump down to the roof.  If the tree is the cat's only means of getting down, and if the cat doesn't know how to climb down a tree, then he is stuck on the roof. Even if the cat knows how to climb down a tree, he may still be stuck on the roof if the limb he used to reach the roof rises out of his reach when his weight is no longer on it, and it is an annoyingly persistent fact of gravity that we can always jump down farther than we can jump up. During this oppressively hot week, I got two calls on consecutive days for two different kitties on two different hot roofs, both of which were two-story apartment buildings, and I have to be honest: I don't like doing roof rescues, especially on two-story apartment buildings. The only way I can get on the roof is to climb a tree, and, sometimes, the tree t...