FD was dispatched for a Life-threatening* emergency rescue this morning, Drove to the station, grabbed my gear, hopped in the back of the ladder truck & we went to the scene. The vehicle was positioned & while the operator raised the main ladder I donned my PPE (personal protective equipment) & climbed up the ladder. As I approached, the victim became scared & crawled further away so I had to shout out commands for repositioning of the ladder. I was then able to grab & cradle the victim. The ladder was then lowered as low as it could go horizontally & I dropped the victim into a tarp being held by my fellow firefighters where mom
scooped up the cat & took him inside!
.* have you ever seen a cat skeleton in a tree?
I’m strongly considering retirement now, kind of like winning the Super Bowl or World Series & going out on top!
Nice job!
Funny, I thought ‘dispatching firemen to rescue cats from trees’ was an old trope from bygone times, like something that only exists in cartoons from the '40s or something.
You should’ve called Mr. Incredible and let him shake the little demon out of the tree.
And I wondered what acronym HERO might be… ah, well. Good for the cat, nice for you.
Makes me think of this commercial.
To think of the legions of fulltime firefighters who never get that opportunity and retire cat save-less. Their career a pale and withered flower devoid of accomplishment.
And here one of our own snatches victory from the jaws of that defeat and is triumphantly carried back to the station on the shoulders of his crewmates!
A Hero to all for our troubled times.
All hail the mighty @Spiderman! Firefighter / EMT extraordinaire.
Pics or it didn’t happen.
C’mon, what’s a cat story without cat pictures?
A heartfelt, rousing “MEOW!!” from me – a once and former volunteer firefighter.
Nicely done.
After not getting one for years/decades? we’ve been relatively busy with them with them; this was our third in about three years. I was at a scheduled/PR event with the other fire co from our town last week when they left a bit early to do the same thing in their district. I am also our photographer & had my drone with me & told them I would tag along to get them some good PR imagery but their Ass’t Chief declined.
Unlike the others where the requestor called the station on a 10-digit, non-emergency # & we just went out; this one was formally dispatched from the county; that could be a 911 call or a 10-digit # that routes to them.
I voted to take the engine, with the high pressure deck (water) gun but was outvoted. 
I needed two hands for the cat; otherwise, there would have been. Sorry.
Y’all need bodycams. Especially to document these really important jobs.
Thank you for the cat rescue!
– I have seen a cat fall out of a tree. She survived the fall without significant injury; but she might not have. She was an inexperienced tree climber and put her weight on a dead branch, which broke; luckily the branch was only about 10 feet or so off the ground and she was a young healthy cat.
I wouldn’t expect to see a cat skeleton in a tree, because I’d expect that when the cat couldn’t hang on any longer they would fall. Most cats up in trees aren’t actually stuck; but some of them are.
This cat was totally chilling, just lying on the branch not doing much. It didn’t move until I got close to it & then it got up to walk out a bit further on the branch. He dug his claws into the branch making it hard to grab him but once I got him he was totally chill until I (intentionally) released him into the tarp below me.
I still say Mythbusters missed the most important idea ever - if cats always land on their feet & toast always lands buttered side down, what happens if you strap a piece of buttered toast to a cat’s back??? 
That one is easy: the inmovable toast moves, the unstoppable cat stops, and both land on a superposition of their backs and their feet until you observe the result. The universum resets. 
It wasn’t a cat or a tree, but …
In 1978, I was home from college visiting my parents. My dad proudly showed me the petunia garden he had planted, which was doing spectacularly well right by the entrance to the house.
While my parents were out, I heard a rustle in the garden, and went out to discover a large billy goat ravaging the petunias. It belonged to the next door neighbors and had perfected the art of escaping from its enclosure.
Unaware of the strength and stubbornness of your typical billy goat, I tried to push it away before the petunias were decimated. The reward for my efforts was being painfully butted in the hip (the eventual bruise was quite impressive).
Knowing how upset my father would be at the petunia carnage, and finding that the goat’s owners weren’t home, I called the police. They dispatched a team, one of whom was a young rookie in his first day on the job.
He may have been a newbie, but he did know how to handle a goat! As I learned by watching, you grab the goat by the horns and pull, forcing him to go wherever it is you want him to. The goat was thus led back to its pen and locked up.
The senior officer on the scene was loving every minute of it. He said they were going to tease the new guy mercilessly about his heroic accomplishment on day one as a cop.
Yes. He’ll be lauded as the Greatest Of All Time. 
Yep. Someone may really love that cat.
The cat attacks the person trying to do this, causing them to drop the toast and go look for protective wear; and then licks the butter off the toast, turning it over if necessary in order to do so. After which the toast has no butter side to be up and the experiment is clearly over.
Mom was outside when we arrived. I walked over to her to her to ask her if she had any treats & she handed me a jar that was already outside on the lawn. She also told me there was an open can of wet food in the crook between the trunk & the branch - I declined to take that; yeech! As soon as the cat hit the tarp she was jumping in it to scoop him up. She had obviously been trying to get her cat down & then called in more resources when that did not work. I have no doubt that cat is loved.
