Cat Rescued by Firefighters After Spending Nearly 72 Hours Stuck in a Warson Woods Tree

Quick Take

• The same claws that carry a cat up in seconds can strand him for days.
• His family searched for three days and never found him. Where were they not looking?
• Why do many cats refuse the one move that would get them down?

A cat spent close to three days stuck in a tree in Warson Woods, Missouri. His family searched the whole time, walking the neighborhood and asking around. They never found him. A stranger did.

Three Days, Then a Ladder

A neighbor spotted the cat stuck up in the tree and called it in, and Glendale firefighters came out with a ladder and got him down. The city posted video of the rescue online on Friday. By the time his paws touched the ground again, he’d been stuck up there for nearly 72 hours. He wasn’t hurt, and his family got him back safe. The first thing on the family’s minds was giving him leftover tuna as a reward for what he’d been through.

Going Up Is Easy. Coming Down Isn’t.

Climbing up a tree trunk takes a cat almost no effort. Its claws curve backward like little hooks, which is exactly the shape you want when you’re pulling yourself up a trunk. Those claws also pull back into the paw when they’re not needed, so they stay sharp instead of getting worn down from dragging along the ground all the time.

The trouble is, those same hooked claws work against a cat on the way down. Normally, a cat doesn’t bother climbing down a tree at all; it just jumps, and that’s fine as long as the branch isn’t too high up. Once a branch gets high enough that jumping stops being safe, the only way down is to back down the trunk tail-first, and plenty of cats simply won’t do it. Climbing down head-first the way they went up isn’t an option for them. So a cat that scrambled up in seconds can spend days unable to make any progress getting back down.

Racing the Clock

Three days stuck in a tree puts real strain on a cat’s body. A cat can start to get dehydrated after about a day without water, and somewhere between two and three days without any water at all is usually when things turn serious. This cat had been up there for nearly 72 hours when firefighters finally reached him, just on the safe side of that window.

Looking Up Made the Difference

His family spent most of three days searching the way people usually search for a missing cat: close to the ground. They looked under porches, behind sheds, along fence lines, even inside car engines. The whole time, the cat was sitting right above all of it, in plain view, waiting for someone to simply look up.