Conference misery::feline_v1

    Well, you may suppose when it has been a nasty experience for her
    she'll think twice before climbing a tree again...
    
    Some time ago, Chanel was heavily involved in a project "The three-
    dimensional appartment" or "Just let's see where I can come if I
    JUMP". Well, she could get into a rather big and heavy plant pot
    that stood on one of my speaker-boxes, but on one nasty occasion
    she tipped it over and broke a bone in her paw.
    
    Luckily, not much harm was done, within 10 days she could use the
    paw again, and within 2 weeks she was on full speed (you can't imagine,
    it takes two grown-up humans, me & the vet, to make one silly X-Ray
    of such a tiny cat's paw, and to succeed only on second try !).
    
    The plant pot was unharmed, and is in its old place. As far as I
    can guess, Chanel has declared it Taboo-area, and got a LOT more
    careful about what she jumped to!
    
    Ad
    

    One of our kitties likes to go up but not come down trees. What
    we do is stand under the tree and coax her down. Reassuring her
    all the way. It usually works after about 5 minutes. If you make
    a habit of going up a ladder to get her she will never try to come
    down but will wait for the ladder to come out and get her. Good
    luck in the future. And remember, no matter how often she tells
    you she can't get down the tree, she knows she realy can
    
    						Geoff
    

    Reply to #2:
    
    Thanks for the advice, Geoff.  By the way, I DID try to coax Katie
    out of the tree, but after an hour, I gave up and asked my husband
    to get a ladder and get her down (it was now midnight and there
    was no sense in losing sleep over it).
    
    I got really creative (I thought).  I got a flat iron rake and strapped
    a pillow to the end of it.  On top of the pillow I put a handful
    of dry food.  As I reached the rake up to her level, she put her
    front paws on the pillow and got a few bites of food, but didn't
    dare put all fours on the pillow (which I was sure she would!) 
    When my husband came out to see what I was doing, he thought I flipped!
    (of course, he had to try the pillow routine himself, though!)
    
    Was it probably a dog that chased her up the tree?  When we first
    saw her she was VERY high in the tree, but managed to get down to
    the "V" spot before the trunk.
    

    Normally, if someone seems to be really not able to come down, I
    climb to the rescue.  However, when I first catsat for kaliph, my
    next door neighbors' half Siamese kitten, I fetched him off the
    roof several times, and then I realized it was a game, sigh.  The
    next time i let him get down by himself, which he did perfectly
    well.  I do think cats can get themselves into tree situations they
    can't get out of safely, however, so I always check things out.
    

    The 'kitty-up-a-tree' is a time-honored trick. The cat can get down
    if it got up under it's own power. Cats like the sensation of going
    up but dislike the sensation of coming down. They are resourcefull
    enough to know how to persuade sympathetic humans to 'rescue' them.
    Once they've succeeded it's doubly hard to convince the cat that
    you are not going to rescue them the next time. Cats have prodigious
    patience, in clement weather, they will meow and appeal for many
    hours, before coming down on their own. And like the watched pot,
    NEVER when you are looking.

    Toulumne, a cat of my neighbors, once got treed in a very tall palm,
    and was there for a week.  It is an extremely tall tree, and no
    one had a ladder tall enough and the fire dept (bleah to them) said
    they don't rescue cats.  My neighbors were trying to rent a "cherry
    picker" when Toulu finally managed to get down.  Meanwhile the retarded
    20 year old or so son on the people across the street tried to climb
    the tree to rescue Toulu, and fell, breaking his back.  Fortunately,
    he healed okay.  Double bleahh to the fire dept.
    

    I think it is more than not liking to go down as much as they like
    to go up: I think cats do not like to go backwards in general, so
    they get panicky if they get stuck someplace where the only way
    out is to go backwards.
    
    A friend of mine at one time owned a small house trailer out in
    the woods in central New Hampshire, where he lived with his big
    black ex-tomcat, Rufus.  Rufus did not generally go outside.  One
    day he disappeared.  Dave poked around trying to figure out where
    the cat, who was used to eating dinner when his pet human did, had
    gotten to, and discovered the next day when he went to take a shower,
    that the BATHTUB WAS CRYING!  Rufus had discovered that if you wedge
    yourself into the edge of it you can "break into" the closest in
    the bedroom, and similarly if you work at it with your claws you
    can open the PLUMBING ACCESS for the bathtub in the back wall of
    the closet.  Than, if you aren't any bigger than Rufus, you can
    squeeze into the area INSIDE between the inner surface of the tub
    and the wall!  Rufus wasn't really "stuck" in there in that he could
    have gotten out if he had backed up, but none of us could reach
    him to pull him out backwards, and he didn't seem to be able to
    cinvince himself to get out on his own.  After a few days, we
    disassembled the wall on the other side of the tub, allowing a hungry
    and scared kitty to emerge face first into the trailer's living
    room - good thing it was a trailer so that the walls were easy to
    take apart without ruinging them; this would have made a kingsize
    mess in most houses!  Rufus never, ever did that again!  He was
    a pretty smart cat, so he got into one kind of trouble after another
    on a regular basis.
    
    The few times my kitties have gotten "stuck" in trees, they have
    gotten themselves out again, though I did end up rescuing a neighbor's
    cat with a ladder after he had been stuck for several days; I think
    he was too dumb to climb down backwards (good thing I own an extension
    ladder).

    Do any of you remember Garrison Keillor's routine about Bertha's
    Kitty Boutique in Lake Wobegone, which sold a little seat on a
    very long handle for rescuing kitties from trees?
    
    He said he never bought one because he figured cats knew how
    to get down by themselves.  Otherwise, half the trees in town
    would be full of little cat skeletons.  And we all know they
    aren't...
    
    

    RE: .8
    
    Here of them (Bertha's Kitty Boutique) ... I have one of their T-shirts
    (smirk, smirk).  It is lavender and has what looks like a kitty's
    version of Mount Rushmore.  I just love it.  
    
    Bernice
    Trouble's Mom

    Well, I guess that I have to add my two cents in on the topic of
    kitty-in-a-tree.
    
    A few years ago, I had my cat spayed, but not until after she'd
    had a litter (oh well).  Anyway, she managed to "put on a few pounds",
    but wasn't grotesquely fat.  
    
    One day, I came home from work to find her approximately 40 feet
    up a pine tree next to the house.  No amount of coaxing would get
    her down.  We re-aimed the spotlight on the side of the house up
    the tree, we tried the 'basket' trick, suggested in one of the other
    replies.  Nothing.  Yes, we *did* call the fire department, but
    they didn't have a ladder long enough (this was a small New Hampshire
    town -- we counted ourselves lucky to have a fire truck! ;-) )
    
    Finally, after 6 days, my SO called the Animal Rescue League in
    Boston.  The gentleman there gave us the advice to ignore her. 
    She was getting too much attention, and would come down when she
    was ready.  So, we turned off the spotlight.  We stopped the basket
    trick (which never had much hope of working, but we had to do
    *something*).  24 hours went by, and she was still up a tree.
    
    Yes, this story does have a happy ending -- one of my cat's kittens
    was returned to us, because the new owners had an allergy.  It took
    about 1/2 hour, and Winter was back on solid ground.  Nothing like
    a little jealousy ...
    
    Oh yes -- when she came down from being in the tree for 8 days,
    she was her original *thin* self again!

    maybe I should stick Sulkitt in a tree for a couple of days? :-)
    :-)
    
    (just kidding)
    
    Rita
    

    A few years ago, we had a calico cat named button.  We were living
    on the second floor of an old house which had a very large oak tree
    in the back yard.  Button used to clime this tree quite regularly
    and she could get down all by herself.  Even without any coaxing.
    She seemed to like it up there, it's was probably one of the most
    peaceful places around.  It was very funny when you were doing the
    dishes and you look out the window and see a cat looking back at
    you!
    
    Holly

    Yes, cats can get up places they can't get down from--it's a lot
    easier to leap up from a small platform than it is to jump down
    onto a small platform. (For a silly example of this, if you saw
    the movie "Remo Williams", remember the exercise in which he jumped
    up onto higher and successfully smaller places in the loft?)
    
    Also, when you hold baskets or platforms on poles up to cats, consider:
    would you jump into something like that?  Kitty may not be good
    enough at Newtonian mechanics to calculate the force necessary to
    balance a cat weight at the end of a long moment arm, but Kitty
    probably has a kittenhood full of experiences of jumping onto an
    unknown/unstable platform and falling several inches.  Not to mention,
    Kitty either knows you well enough to know you're weird (why does
    she talk into that thing at the end of the springy-cord toy?) or
    if you're a stranger, may not know you at all. 
    
    If I hear the line about cat skeletons in trees one more time, I'm
    going to blandly turn to the person, and say, "Oh, well, you do
    know that raccoons climb trees, and they *can* be rather vicious."
    (And if I received a blank stare, continue along the line that if a 
    hungry raccoon can't get garbage it might settle for...)  
    Sorry, but I get a little grouchy about this one.
    Elsewhere in this notesfile of stories about why one cat or another
    couldn't climb down because it was injured or whatever, and that
    it's rather hard to determine this from 20 feet below.
    

    RE 812.13
    
    I know exactly what you mean about a cat being injured and you not
    aware of it.  
    
    I had a beautiful tom cat named Smoky.  He really thought he was
    a dog because he would follow me anywhere and come when he was called.
    
    One day I had just come home from work and was calling Smoky.  He
    came running towards me.  Out of nowhere came three (not one but
    three) huge dogs zeroing in on Smoky.  Now Smoky could always hold
    his own against any one dog but he definitely knew he was out-numbered.
    He took a quick look at me and then at a nearby tree to see which
    was closer.  He decided that the tree was closer and made a sprint
    for it.  He almost made it....  By the time a got close enough to
    scare the dogs away they had already gotten to Smoky and had him
    down.  Boy, what a fighter...  Once I got the dogs off of him he
    made a dash for the tree and went up about twenty to twenty-five
    feet.  After trying to coax him down for about an hour,  a good
    samaratan (sp) brought out a ladder and climbed to get him.  Smoky
    was wary of strangers and did claw the gentleman, but he persisted
    and finally brought him down.  
    
    When I finally got Smoky into the house and put him down he just
    fell over.  The dogs had damaged one of his back legs.  I rushed him
    to the vet and found out that they had damaged a nerve in his leg.
    It took Smoky two months to heal but he was fine.
    
    Morale to story:
    
    	There are indeed times that a cat can't get down from a tree
    	even if they look ok on the outside.   
    
    Sandi