Three cheers for Lewiston resident Tanya Lippke, who went way beyond the call of duty last week to rescue a cat stuck high up in her home’s maple tree.
The stray tiger cat was rescued Thursday but not before enduring five days of scorching heat and one torrential rainstorm.
Lippke tried convincing the fire department, police department and animal control officer to intervene.
They all declined, which is standard procedure in most places, along with helping people with bat-in-house scares.
Then she called the folks at PETA — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals — who agreed to pay for a tree service to drop by.
She also called the Sun Journal, which quickly dispatched its always eager pet-rescue reporter, Mark LaFlamme, to the scene.
He and photographer Amber Waterman documented how Taylor Dulac, of Gerry’s Tree Service, scaled the tree and retrieved the cat.
There are good reasons fire departments don’t do this, among them the cost of sending a truck to a cat rescue and the danger and difficulty of running up a boom or ladder truck in a crowded neighborhood.
Plus, it is a diversion that could add precious minutes to the time it might take to respond to a real emergency.
Firefighters have a traditional question for people with cat/tree problems. When was the last time you saw a cat skeleton in a tree?
Never, right? The inference being that all cats eventually find their way back down.
Which, perhaps, misses the point. That might eventually happen, but how much distress should an animal endure before humans try to help?
Tanya Lippke turned out to be the compassionate person who took matters in hand. There’s at least one in every neighborhood.
But we got to wondering, how does one get a cat out of a tree? And, as you might expect, the Web is full of interesting ideas. For example:
• Get as high up in the tree as you can and “grease” a path down the side of it with dog food. Why dog food? It has a stronger smell, says the catalogue of all things cat, felineexpress.com.
Hmmm. Stronger than fish head and liver pate? Impossible.
• Tie a rope to a laundry basket and a rock to the other end. Throw the rock up over a branch, without braining the cat, haul up the basket and lower the cat to the ground.
No way. Obviously written by someone who does not know the first rule of feline behavior: A cat will never do what you want it to do. Never. Too dog-like.
• Spread the ground under the tree with bird seed, then leave. Eventually, birds will gather at the base of the tree and the cat’s natural inclination to kill will overcome its fear of heights.
Hmmm. Cats do love birds. This might actually work, especially if those birds have been laughing at your treed cat.
• Spray the cat with a hose, then be ready to catch it with a blanket when it jumps or is knocked from the tree.
First, nobody has enough water pressure in their garden hose to do this. Second, that cat is never coming home if you do.
Among the things NOT to do, according to felineexpress, is call the local newspaper. “Unless Fluffy is an unusual story, they aren’t going to come …”
Who knew!
editorialboard@sunjournal.com
Send questions/comments to the editors.
