PHOTOS: Calling the fire department to rescue a cat from a tree is cliché enough, but a bunch of rookie firefighters on their first official call? Even the hackiest sitcom writer would call that contrived.
That’s what happened in Evansville on Sunday. Evansville Fire and EMS Capt. Dan Coursen and a group of trainees dropped what they were doing to help rescue a cat from a tree it had curiously climbed.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever gotten a cat out of a tree in 18 years,” Coursen told Cowboy State Daily. “We’ve had several of those calls, but it’s the first time I’ve ever had to go do it.”
Coursen and two other Evansville firefighters were training four rookies on Sunday when they got a call from the Evansville Police Department. Someone spotted a cat that had climbed a tree and gotten stuck, and it had apparently been stuck there for at least a day.
“We didn’t need all the guys, but everybody jumped on the trucks with us,” Coursen said. “The four guys we’re bringing on are going through training, so they had to be a part of that.
The rescue was straightforward enough. The gray-and-white cat was about 30 feet up in the tree, so all that was needed was a 40-foot ladder and one firefighter to climb up and pluck the caterwauling cat from its perch.
If the cat had an owner, they weren’t at the base of the tree. Coursen said they let the cat go on its own recognizance. “He was right there next to a trailer, and we assumed that he belonged to that trailer, so he stayed there,” he said.
For the four new recruits, responding to a cat in a tree as their first call with Evansville Fire and EMS was surreal. “It was just a service call to get a cat out of a tree, but they were very excited to get a chance to use some of their skills that they’ve been practicing on,” Coursen said. “It was a first for all of us.”
