If a cat’s up a tree in Vancouver, who are you going to call?
It’s a question some Grandview-Woodland residents were recently faced with when a neighbourhood cat was stuck three storeys up a tree for several hours.
Laura, who asked to be identified by first name only to protect her privacy, lives on the fourth floor of an apartment off Commercial Drive and works from home.
At lunch time on a late July day, Laura and her partner noticed a cat perched high in a tree outside their apartment window.
“We were kind of just laughing about it at first,” Laura told Vancity Lookout, “but then we were both just like, ‘Okay, should we call the fire department?’ Like that's what you do, right?”
Apparently not. In what Laura described as a “really short conversation” with someone at the nearby Victoria Drive firehall, Laura and her partner were told the cat could get down on its own, and the fire department wouldn’t be coming to help.
The fire department has responded to similar calls in the past, but “it's not something we generally do,” Al Gregory, Battalion Chief with Vancouver Fire Rescue Services, told Vancity Lookout.
Gregory recommended trying to lure a cat down from a tree with food, adding that “the majority of the time, cats will find their way down.”
The cat in question didn't move from this branch for most of the day / Laura (submitted)
In Laura’s case, the cat was still on the same branch that evening, so she and her partner decided to take action. They spread bright blankets and pillows at the base of the tree and got cat treats in an attempt to lure the dormant cat down from the treetop. “It was pretty hopeless,” Laura described.
Laura’s neighbours started to ask what she was doing, and after she explained “people kept asking us if we had called the fire department,” she said. Crowd-sourced alternatives included calling an arborist, using a climbing harness and ropes, or finding someone with a cherry picker truck, but those weren’t available on short notice.
After about 20 minutes, the cat’s two owners arrived. “They had been looking for it all day,” Laura described. “They have a GPS on the cat, so they'd been going back and forth on the street and around the area, but didn’t think to look up.”
The cat’s owners took matters into their own hands, using a ladder borrowed from the Commercial Drive Legion nearby to climb the tree’s trunk up to the first branches, and then climbed the rest of the way up the tree to reach the cat.
With the spooked cat in one arm, one of the owners was able to climb back down to the lowest branch, ultimately throwing the cat down the rest of the way where Laura and other neighbours safely caught the cat in a stretched out blanket.
The owner got down safely as well, but it was “pretty risky,” Laura said, adding she was “a little worried for him.”
Gregory with VFRS said members of the public are welcome to give the department a call in these cases, but “everything would be assessed on a case-by-case basis,” and would depend on factors like how busy VFRS is with other calls, the location of the cat and the tree, the amount of time it would take, and their ability to safely deploy a ladder to reach the animal.
Laura’s story took one more dramatic turn, as the aggravated cat took off into the neighbourhood again after being released from the tree. Happily, the cat ran straight home to its owners’ balcony, Laura reported.
“All’s well that ends well,” she said.
