cats

When I was about 11 I had a cat I loved dearly get stuck in a massive cottonwood tree over my house for 5 days, it was agonizing listening to him cry every day.

My parents were cold and heartless about it and joked that there would be a "cat skeleton tree" in our yard.

I tried everything, finally got an older sibling to help throw a fishing line up and pull up a bucket with wet food. It didn't make it quite to his limb, but eventually the smell drove him to climb towards it, and from there I was able to coax him down. He was covered in ants and dehydrated but he was fine.

A couple weeks later he ran up a pine tree and got stuck for 4 days again. This time I fashioned a pole and just knocked him off the branch. He fell about 20 feet into a pile of leaves and pine needles and was fine.

“For the safety of both the animal and our crews, Xcel Energy is not able to respond to remove animals from power poles or other electrical equipment. When animals are frightened, rescues can unfortunately lead to injury to the animal or to the people attempting to help. Additionally, our equipment carries a risk of electrical contact, even when it may not appear energized. Because of these safety risks, we cannot shut off power for rescue attempts,” Xcel said on social media.

Translation: "Cat might scratch our dude, or we might get sued if we accidentally hurt it during rescue. Additionally, though we 100% have to have the ability to shut down that strip for maintenance, if we totally didn't do that and went up there anyway it would be dangerous which is why we do shut it off during maintenance. Because of the safety risks involved with literally breaking maintenance protocol which is 100% optional, we could just shut it down like we do for maintenance for ten fucking minutes and grab the cat with a cherry picker, but fuck your cat."

The cat was rescued! They didn't say how, but he is safe.

The trick is to ignore them. My cat got halfway up the tree in our yard before deciding he didn’t like it, then did some crazy Free Solo shit to climb down, including swinging from a branch over to the main trunk from a claw hold. He’s never gone up again.

My father was a firefighter, and his go-to quote every time someone wanted a cat rescued was "How often do you see a cat skeleton in a tree?"

They eventually jump down. They can generally survive terminal velocity falls without injury so long as they land well, which they generally do when they jump out of the tree. But it's still scary, so it may take them a bit to build up the nerve for the jump.

Xcel literally does nothing right. What a garbage company anymore.

Omg wasn't this story on reddit a few days ago? Something is off here. Why would the cat simply stay there for 5 days? No cat would just sit there for that long - hunger usually gets the better of them and they risk jumping even if afraid at first. Also why haven't people done anything about that cat in the days since this was posted on reddit? If that cat really is stuck don't wait for the fkn electric company, get a fkn ladder and get the cat. Or get a blanket under the pole and prod the cat until it jumps. No one has been doing anything about that cat for 5 days, wtf?? None of this makes any sense

Aww would be a shame if a pole a few blocks up just 'failed' for some reason. :/ The cat could co-incidentally be free to climb down or be rescued during the totally unexpected outage!

“Leave me alone!”- le cat.

(Don’t think xcell actually needs to turn the power off, but they do need to send a technician in a bucket.)

Full story: https://kdvr.com/news/local/aurora-residents-rally-to-try-and-rescue-cat-stuck-on-pole-for-5-days/