Filled with firs, cedars, maples, and spruce, Canada’s Vancouver Island is a wonderland of trees. With all those fat trunks for scratching and lush limbs for climbing, it’s a forested paradise for cats. But for all their cavorting and climbing in trees, kitties sometimes find themselves in a sticky situation, and it’s not pine sap. Though it’s easy for a cat to climb a tree, it’s not so easy getting down again. But lucky for the cats of Vancouver Island, arborist Kyle Hobbs, owner of Coastal Tree Works, can be found hanging out in trees too. And it’s not just his climbing gear that helps kitties put their paws back on land. Turns out his crane is pretty handy too!
Just ask a Colwood Creek Estates cat that found himself stuck in a tree for nearly 36 hours. It was certainly no fun affair for the kitty or his parents. And when the cat’s family saw Hobbs’s crane jutting high in the sky just down the road, they enlisted his help in rescuing their cat.
Right Time, Right Place
Hobbs has rescued plenty of cats in trees before, but this mission would prove a bit different. Hoisting snowmobiles from a backyard, Hobbs was using his 110-foot, 30-ton crane. Not his first choice of equipment for helping a cat out of a tree. But there are some moments you just have to make do with what you’ve got on hand,
As Hobbs told the Times Colonist, “I didn’t have my climbing gear with me, but I had the crane.”
“Using a quarter-of-a-million-dollar piece of equipment to rescue a cat didn’t seem very [logical] for a cat removal, but I had a harness.”
So, Hobbs asked one of his crew how he felt about hanging onto the crane’s ball to pluck the cat out of the tree, and “he said: ‘Let’s do it.'”
In a Pinch, a Crane Works
Raising his crewman about seventy feet in the air to meet the cat, Hobbs said the relieved feline jumped right into his rescuer’s waiting lap.
“I’ve done lots of cats rescues where you spend a couple of hours bouncing around the tree trying to find the dang cat,” explained Hobbs. “But this time, in a matter of a minute and a half, the cat was just so tired of being up there it leaped right onto his lap.”
From start to finish, the rescue took about thirty minutes. Once on the ground, the cat went into a carrier and headed straight home.
No Time to “Pawze”
Caught up in the rescue, Hobbs didn’t notice the crowd that had gathered to watch the rescue unfold. Because Hobbs didn’t know they were being photographed, he joked on Facebook, he and the cat “didn’t ‘Pawze’ for a picture.”
Picture of the cat or not, the community extended their thanks to Hobbs and crew via Facebook.
Resident Lindsay Wilson posted a photo and wrote, “When you go to this length to rescue a cat, you’re a really good person. Kyle Hobbs, you’re a true hero.”
We agree!
H/T: www.pbqnews.com
Feature Image: Coastal Tree Works/Facebook