Cat Rescue Guy

I had just arrived home after the rescue of Minerva when my phone rang. The call was from Paul who asked if I could rescue his cat, Monkey, who had been stuck in a tree for five days. Paul lives with his wife, Melanie, in a remote area, and Monkey was stuck up very high in a very tall Red Oak tree just inside the woods behind his home. Monkey got his name because of how quickly he climbs up trees. He has done this before with other trees, but he always stops on the first branch and comes down from there. In this tree, however, the first branch was at least 40 feet high, and Monkey didn't know how to get down from that height. I got the directions to their home and told them I would be there as soon as I could. After I hung up, however, I remembered that my wife and I had planned a date to the LSU Opera performance that evening, so this would have to be a quick rescue for me to make it back home in time. Fortunately, my wife is a very understanding woman and knows that a last-min...

Lance's wife drove to the store a few miles away, and when she got out of the car, she heard a faint meow from somewhere. She looked around and didn't see a cat anywhere, so she did her shopping, came back to the car and drove home. When she got out of her car, again, she heard a faint meow. Now she was very concerned and called her husband, Lance, out to help investigate. When they opened the hood of the car, they found a kitten hiding in a small space behind the headlights. They pulled the kitten out of the car and took it inside. The kitten was scared, of course, but otherwise fine. She was a beautiful Torbie, and they decided to keep her. Their two small boys wanted to name her Minerva from the Harry Potter tales, and she settled into her new home very well. Today, Minerva is about nine months old, and she got stuck in a tree in her backyard. She had climbed it before, but she went only to the first fork of the tree which was about ten feet high and was able to come b...

Sherlock was only 6-months old when he had his first experience with tree-climbing. As a healthy, energetic, gray tabby boy, he had no trouble at all climbing up and very quickly and proudly found himself 35 feet high. But when he wanted to go down, he discovered he couldn't do it. If there was a secret to going down, he didn't know it. It seems that his mama never taught him how to do that. Fortunately, Triche saw his plight and sprung into action. Triche took Sherlock from her daughter and grand-daughter when they became concerned about Sherlock's safety around his large, canine brothers. Triche called the local fire department, and they actually sent someone out there with a ladder. The fireman saw that he could not reach the cat with his ladder, so he called me. After talking with him and Triche, I agreed to go out there to see if I could get Sherlock down. I had some difficulties getting my rope installed in the tree, and the commotion I created caused some conce...

It was just eleven days ago when I rescued Tahli, and now he needs to be rescued again. In fact, he is in the same spot in the same tree. Same song, second verse. I was not happy with the way his rescue worked out the last time, because we had some bad luck that scared him and caused him to back away from me in fear. He ended up falling 10 feet into another nearby tree where a good neighbor stood up on a ladder and brought him down. While it all worked out in the end, it was a scary experience for Tahli, and I wanted to be sure I was extra careful with him this time. He is a friendly boy, and I want to be sure that I make friends with him this time and bring him down in a more comfortable and secure way. At his last rescue, the bad luck started when I shot the weighted bag over the limb I wanted, and it got tangled in the foliage of another nearby tree. It took some noisy and violent pulling to get it free, and that is what scared Tahli. This time, I decided to play it safe and j...

It was just two and a half weeks ago that I rescued a cat named Cookie, and now I have a completely different cat with the same name to rescue. This Cookie is all black except for a thin strip of white on his chest, and he is stuck in the top of a vine-covered Tallow tree on the fence line of his backyard. We don't know why he climbed up there. He has never done anything like this before, but there he is now, about 40 feet high on the highest branch of the tree. Sheila found him there late in the evening, and the next day, she called the Animal Control office which referred her to me. You can't see Cookie in this picture, because he is covered by the vines and foliage behind the branch that enters the circle, but that is where he is. Since Cookie was already at the top of the tree, I could not set my rope above him. At first, I picked the next significant branch below him and planned to install my rope there, but just before I began to aim my big sling shot to launch my wei...