Stranded cat defies rescue efforts
Published: January 25, 2006
A calico cat stuck atop a wooden electrical pole in San Pedro for four days had neighbors below wringing their hands and pleading with public officials to execute a rescue effort Tuesday afternoon.
But in the end it was a decisive neighbor, a 63-year-old contract electrician, who scaled a ladder and plucked the feline off of its perch. Unfortunately, the cat refused to stay in a bucket the rescuer toted with him and sprang to the ground, but appeared to be unharmed and dashed between some nearby houses.
Once the animal was grabbed, it began to fight back.
“It was very difficult,” said Guillermo Ortega, the neighbor who rescued the cat, a familiar neighborhood stray that is fed regularly by several neighbors.
The cat first appeared on the pole Saturday morning. On Tuesday afternoon before the rescue attempt, the feline napped in the afternoon sun, splayed out on a cross-beam high above the sidewalk at Mesa and Amar streets.
Neighbors have spent the last several days trying to coax the animal back to ground, but nothing seemed to work.
Thinking the cat was looking weak, Ortega and his wife rigged an open can of tuna to a long wooden pole and managed to get it up to the cat Monday night. The cat quickly devoured the food. Many said the animal looked frightened and stuck.
Day after day, onlookers would gather, tossing cat toys, putting out food on the ground, calling “kitty, kitty, kitty” and, finally, propping up a wooden beam hoping the cat would use that to crawl down.
“We’ve tried everything,” said neighbor Martha Carbajal earlier in the day on Tuesday. “I feel sorry for him, but what can you do?” Carbajal said the cat turned into something of a neighborhood cause. Her brother from Cerritos even had been asking about the cat when he called, she said.
“Everybody stops by to watch, all the neighbors,” she said. “We called the Fire Department but they said the cat would come down” on its own.
“If the cat got up there, the cat can get down,” said Los Angeles city fire Capt. Kelly Toman.
He was sympathetic after neighbors called the station for help, but said the electrical wires made it too much of a risk for firefighters to attempt a rescue.
“If we could safely go up and rescue the cat, we would,” Toman said.
The Department of Water and Power and city animal shelter officers were working together Tuesday to try to coordinate a rescue, but in the meantime Ortega took action on his own at about 4 p.m. Los Angeles city fire Capt. Keith Massey said private citizens should not climb power poles, but added that since Ortega was a professional, he had more knowledge than most.
“His being an electrician, he knows the cross arms where the cat was (sitting) is all telephone and cable lines — there’s no power there,” Massey said. “But we’d never recommend that and neither would the power company.”
Eventually, a cat’s instinct will usually kick in and the animal will find its way back down, according to officer Doreen Vail of the Harbor Area shelter.
“These are usually inexperienced cats” that get stuck, Vail said.
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