Neighborhood Comes Together to Save Cat in a Tree

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Recently, people in an East Lyme neighborhood managed to come together for the purpose of rescuing a cat stuck in a tree. The whole thing started when a woman named Debbie Green heard the sound of meowing while she was gardening. She spent a fair amount of time searching for the cat because she was concerned that it needed help. However, it wasn’t until Green looked up that she saw the cat situated about 75 feet off of the ground. She didn’t know it at the time, but she had found the neighboring Whitlow family’s Tyler, who had escaped a few days earlier.

Green’s initial plan was to contact emergency services. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t help out, with the result that she started speaking with her neighbors to see if someone could come up with something more workable. Thanks to this, another neighbor named Paula Taylor started contacting a wide range of parties to see what help she could find, which was possible because she had plenty of contacts from her work as an animal rescue volunteer. Eventually, she got in touch with Ian Preston, who was the owner of Preston Family Tree Removal. Something that made him very well-suited for the task at hand.

There was a moment of suspense because Preston’s bucket truck left him about 10 feet short of Tyler. However, he was able to use a rope to pull down the relevant branch, thus enabling him to get the cat into a cat carrier. It seems that Preston had been well-prepared, not least because he had experience with a previous effort that didn’t go quite as smoothly. In any case, Tyler has now been reunited with the Whitlow family because of everyone mentioned who assisted in the matter.

How Does This Kind of Thing Happen?

Some people might be wondering how this kind of thing can happen. After all, cats have a reputation for being excellent tree climbers, so much so that they are sometimes called arboreal animals. As a result, it can seem very strange when one hears about cats getting stuck in trees, particularly since such stories are by no means uncommon. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there isn’t a single cause for this issue. Instead, there are numerous potential explanations that can contribute to a single incident to various extents. For starters, just because a species is famous for a particular physical characteristic, that doesn’t mean that every single member of that species can show off that particular physical characteristic. For example, humans as a species are supposed to be one of the best endurance runners that can be found on the planet. However, most of us can’t claim to be great endurance runners, particularly since we tend to live a much more sedentary lifestyle than our not so distant ancestors. Similarly, just because cats as a species are supposed to be great tree climbers, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a particular cat will be so. Sometimes, a cat isn’t in the best shape. Other times, a cat lacks practical experience. Whatever the case, there are plenty of cats out there that aren’t as good at tree-climbing as they could be under other circumstances.

Moving on, it is worth mentioning that a cat tends to be much better at climbing up than climbing down. This is because their claws are much better for the first task than the second task, which is a real problem when a cat scrambles upward for one reason or another before realizing that they can’t get down with the same ease. Yes, cats have a reputation for being very good at coming out of long falls in excellent condition, which is well-founded. However, there are very real limits to that capability. This can be seen in how cats actually have not one but two landing strategies. If they are falling short distances, they will land on their legs, which are quite good at acting as shock absorbers. In contrast, if cats are falling long distances, they will spread out their legs for the purpose of slowing themselves down as much as possible by creating as much drag resistance as possible. Even so, it is possible for cats to get seriously hurt while using this landing strategy, which is the kind of thing that most animals tend to avoid. After all, they don’t enjoy being hurt anymore than we do.

What Should People Do About This Kind of Thing?

There isn’t a real consensus on what people should do when a cat is stuck in a tree. This is perhaps unsurprising because one such incident can be very different from another, meaning that there isn’t a real universal solution. Sometimes, people will try various ways to coax the cat out of the tree. For example, they might leave food beneath the tree to lure the cat down, which might be helpful if the cat climbed the tree because it was agitated by something. Similarly, they might try using various pieces of equipment to do the job themselves. One example would be climbing a stepladder. However, a more inventive method would be tossing a rope tied to a weighted object over a nearby branch before using that to raise a cat carrier in the hopes that the cat will get in on their own. Of course, these methods are limited to smaller trees, which are more manageable for both cats and humans.

For trickier situations, people like to call emergency services, not least because that has been depicted by a wide range of media. Unfortunately, Tyler’s story should make it clear that this is often not possible because emergency services prefer to keep themselves available for humans who are in need. Instead, it is better for people to call animal control. Even if they can’t help, animal control can at least point them in the direction of someone who can, particularly since they should have encountered similar scenarios in the past. Preston Family Tree Removal isn’t the first tree removal company that has been called upon for such tasks, which makes sense because they are the ones with the right expertise, the right experience, and the right equipment for helping out.