Vancouver Island, Canada’s largest island, is a forest of firs, cedars, maples, and spruce. It’s a forested paradise for cats, with all those thick trunks for scratching and luscious limbs for climbing. Kitties, for all their frolicking and climbing in trees, occasionally get themselves into a sticky predicament, and it’s not due to pine sap.
Climbing a tree is simple for a cat, but coming down is more difficult. However, arborist Kyle Hobbs, proprietor of Coastal Tree Works, may also be spotted hanging out in trees, which is fortunate for the cats of Vancouver Island. His climbing gear isn’t the only thing that helps kittens get their claws back on solid ground. It turns out that his crane is also rather useful!
Just ask a cat from Colwood Creek Estates who was trapped in a tree for nearly 36 hours. The kitty and his parents were not having a good time. When the cat’s family noticed Hobbs’ crane sticking high into the sky just down the road, they begged his assistance in retrieving their animal.
Hobbs has saved many cats from trees in the past, but this mission would be different. Hobbs was using his 110-foot, 30-ton crane to lift snowmobiles from a backyard. It wasn’t his first choice of tools for rescuing a cat from a tree. However, there are times when you simply must make do with what you have on hand.
“I didn’t have my climbing gear with me,” Hobbs explained, “but I had the crane.”
“It didn’t seem very [logical] to use a quarter-million-dollar piece of equipment to save a cat, but I had a harness.”
“Let’s do it,” Hobbs replied after asking one of his staff how he felt comfortable holding onto the crane’s ball to pluck the cat out of the tree.
Hobbs said the relieved feline rushed right into his rescuer’s waiting lap after he raised his crewman about seventy feet in the air to greet him.
“I’ve done a lot of cat rescues when you’re bouncing around the tree for a couple of hours trying to find the dang cat,” Hobbs explained. “But this time, the cat was just so weary of being up there that it leaped right onto his lap in less than a minute and a half.”
The rescue took around thirty minutes from start to end. Once on the ground, the cat was placed in a carrier and taken home.
Hobbs was so engrossed in the rescue that he didn’t notice the audience that had gathered to watch it unfold. Hobbs joked on Facebook that he and the cat “didn’t ‘Pawze’ for a picture” since they didn’t realize they were being taken.
Whether or not the cat was photographed, the community expressed its gratitude to Hobbs and his crew on Facebook.
“When you go to this length to rescue a cat, you’re a genuinely kind person,” resident Lindsay Wilson remarked on Facebook. You’re a great hero, Kyle Hobbs.”
We agree!
