How much is a cat rescue?

You’re better off calling and asking directly, because as far as I know, most fire departments won’t actually get the cat out of the tree. You’re probably better off just waiting it out.

Can you call the fire department and ask them? I really hope that it’s free.

89 cents. Get a can of tuna fish. Open it. Put it under the tree.

It might not cost anything, if the cat’s like my beloved Katrina (AKA Roofy).

It took her about 3 seconds to realize that she could climb down the tree, by descending head-up and posterior-down.

I had a cat stuck in a tree for about three days. It was late October and the nights were getting cold. I got the neighbor to come with his ladder and get the cat. I was grateful but it was his dog that chased my cat up the tree.

You might try calling a home repairman to come with a ladder. Ask how much he’‘ll want.

How high up is the cat?

Call a tree guy. Many will scale the tree and get the kitty. I had to do this once when my young cat was stuck up a huge Oak tree for over 2 days. Call tree trimming services in your area. The guy shimmied right up with hooks on his boots and put my cat in a pillowcase on a pulley on his belt. Took about 20–30 minutes cost me around $200.00 if I remember right but I tipped him generously.

Cats aren’t that dumb. It will get down. If they couldn’t get down, we’d see dead cats up in trees everywhere.

@cazzie – did I show you the necklace I made with bones from the cat skeleton I found under the tree at the Renaissance festival grounds?

@cazzie No, that’s a myth, Cats can and do get stuck and fall from trees or power poles. They aren’t supernatural creatures after all.

What happens with cats is they get scared and they climb higher. It gets to a point where their life is at stake, or in the cases where they’re days in the tree, like mine was, they get dehydrated, cold, sick.

@jca Yes, my guy was up in the tree for over 2 days and it was cold and a big storm was coming in. I wasn’t going to risk leaving him there any longer. If he was going to come down he would have in over 2 days. He was scared and really trapped in the tree.

I think the realities about feline descending abilities are somewhere between what @cazzie and @Coloma posted.

Most cats have difficulty climbing down a tree at first, because their claws are curved only for upward climbing. When they try to descend face-down, they can’t sink their claws into the bark.

However, I’d say at least some cats can eventually climb down a tree on their own.

I saw my indoor-outdoor cat, Katrina, learn how to descend from a tree in about 3 seconds. She also figured out to descend from the roof of my house. I didn’t see how long it took her, but my guess is less than a minute.

For a different example, it took my outdoor cat almost 2 days to find out how to get down from the same roof. I’ve never seen him up a tree.

I wouldn’t worry until after day 2, depending on the weather.

I recently went through a similar but very different thing.

It was so hot and even with the bridge I made it stayed up for there for days. If it had been a tree the cat would have probably died.

And I was sitting on my porch one day and I saw a cat chase a squirrel up a telephone pole. The squirrel was a lot faster and after climbing the pole about 30 feet the cat gave up. Problem was the cat was stuck. It had no idea how to get it back down. So after about 30 minutes of being stuck on the pole I could tell it was getting scared. It wasn’t budging.

Luckily my sister was banging a guy that did installations for Comcast. So my sister called him and he came over with a long ladder made to connect to poles. The cat pretty much jumped into his arms.

This might be the only good thing I can say about Comcast. They didn’t know it but they paid a dude to rescue a cat.