“You get such a high coming down a tree with a cat.” – Dan Kraus
Dan Kraus is an American arborist and a past world champion tree climber. He has a high profile presence on the internet.
An arborist is a tree surgeon but as firefighters ‘probably won’t help’ (I can confirm this from the many stories that I have read) you might have to rely on someone else to rescue your cat from a tree.
Most ‘ordinary’ citizens would not attempt it because it’s damned dangerous! Who has the head for heights to go and fetch down a cat in a tree? Not many, or the courage.
That said, Dan provides some tips and tricks for someone who wants to have a go and he also provides a unique (I believe) world directory of arborists who are prepared to rescue your cat if she/he is stuck up that ubiquitous tree.
Tips and Tricks
- Give your cat 24 hours to let him/her come out of the tree of her own accord. My thought is that you may even give her a bit longer than that.
- When attempting a rescue wear (a) a hard hat (b) a harness and (c) boots.
- Stay tied to the tree by either (a) a rope looped over a sturdy branch above you or (b) two ropes ‘secured around the trunk’.
- Climb quietly to avoid scaring the cat. Don’t break branches and don’t shout at people watching below.
- Watch for signs that the cat might jump. Signs: cat crawls out towards the end of the branch while looking at the ground.
- Note: 1 in 15 cats jump at this point. He has rescued 1000 cats and none have been hurt after jumping as they have landed on soft ground. You can ask people below to hold a sheet or tarp to catch a jumping cat.
- Take food treats to entice the cat.
- Take a bag of some sort to place the cat in. Kraus takes an army surplus laundry sack. He customised it by sewed a leather glove to it.
- Expect the cat to be hostile! Don’t pet the cat. Try and encourage her with nice sounds.
- When close enough grab the cat by the scruff of the neck to ‘disable’ her via the kitten response. Place cat in bag and secure.
The directory
This is on Kraus’s website which is concerned with cat rescue from trees.
Please click on this link if you are interested in perusing it.
I got to wondering about the usual reply to those scenarios, “Ever see a dead cat in a tree?”
Surely, Google-Images, with its billions of selfies and in-peril cat-photos MUST have tomes and tomes of dead-cats in trees to PROVE that millions of cats die that way (by natural selection).
I put “dead cat in a tree” into Google Image search.
I got a whopping 185 hits out of the billions of photos available through them. To test photo availability, I did a search just on the letter “A”. I get 7,310,000,000, 7.31 Billion. The word “the” returns a slightly lower hit-count. Cat OR Cats returns 521,000,000 hits.
Only TWO appear to be actual dead-cats fatally stuck in a tree. And we don’t know if they got there on their own or were already dead and carried there as an owl’s, hawk’s, or eagle’s cache — one that might have died and never returned to eat. Or the cat just found dead on a road and put there for the mythical photo-op. Or maybe the tree was even struck by lightning while the cat was there. (A hawk died that way in a tree here one year, from a lightening-strike.)
With the millions of cats climbing trees and getting stuck each year, I’d say the statistics of needing to save any cat from any tree is near absolute zero. What’s 2 out of 521,000,000 cat-photos, statistically speaking. And we have no proof it even died from that natural-selection behavior.
Interestingly, the most photos are from a TNR fan who was arrested for hanging all his dead TNR-cats in a tree. Huge brouhaha over that a few years ago, HSUS & ACA offering enormous ($25K) rewards to find the person killing cats by bludgeoning them to death with the found-nearby baseball-bat and pipe, and hanging them in a tree. They even paid for a huge billboard-ad to find the culprit. Only to find out it was a cat-lover that was scraping his roadkill TNR cats off the pavement after having fed them his whole life, putting his death-by-attrition TNR cats in bags and hanging them in a tree to keep other animals from desecrating his dead TNR cats.
It’s time for your medication.