I came across this story last night and it seemed like the kind of thing people here would enjoy. A woman in Wisconsin was having her basement renovated a few weeks ago. She didn’t see much of her cat, Mary Poppins, but she assumed it was because the cat’s quite shy and had run away. When the cat didn’t come back she started to worry the cat had become trapped. She went down into the basement and started calling the cat when she heard weak meows coming from behind some newly installed drywall. She called the fire department who broke into where Mary Poppins was and rescued her. The cat is now doing fine. Meanwhile, I suspect the fire department’s joking about getting cats out of basements rather than trees!
My cat had been poking around the attic, found a spot where there was a space between the plaster of an interior wall, and fell from the attic through the second floor, and ended up lodged upside down inside the ground floor wall. She started crying, and it echoed oddly around in the wall. It took a while for us to find her. My husband had to bash a couple of holes in the wall before we found her.she was covered in plaster dust and had peed all over herself. He rescued her, washed her and dried her. She has never forgiven him.
The linked article was an abbreviated version of the original story. Thermal imaging cameras are nifty devices that fire companies are buying ($10K and up), but we were never instructed in their use for finding fearful, famished, fettered felines.
Hey! The fire company should bill the lady’s insurance for performing a CAT scan! I’ll be here all week, folks.
I read a book on the making of Cleopatra (the disaster laden Liz Taylor version) many years ago. I remember one of the many many many many many expensive production delays was when a cat somehow got inside of a very expensive Egyptian set while it was being constructed without anybody noticing and had kittens a few hours later. They had to tear up the set to free the cat and kittens, then reconstruct the elaborate panels and reassemble the set, the cost of destroying/rebuilding the set and delaying unionized techs and expensive actors for several hours adding up to about $60,000. Some members of the cast and crew adopted the kittens when they were old enough so that they could boast of having an offspring of “the most expensive cat in the world”.
And Amontillado is fun to say.
I had one of my cats get in my garage and climb some shelves and climb through a small hole in the cieling and was running around in the attic (which isn’t really much of an attic). I discovered what he’d done when I heard faint cat cries coming from above me. Fortunately, I was able to coax him out with a can of tuna.
