Fire Fighters Do Not Rescue Kittens Stuck In Trees In Brooklyn

FORT GREENE — Natalie Clark learned the hard way that firefighters will not rescue your terrified kitten from a tree.

Luna, a five-month-old siamese kitten, ran out of her house on Carlton Street Wednesday morning, clawed her way up a three-story tall tree, and refused to come down for two long days, said her owner.

“It was like a baby crying and you can’t get to it,” said Clark, 46. “I was really unhappy.”

When the fire department refused to come rescue Luna, Clark corralled the block to come to her aid. A rock-climber who lived nearby shimmied his way up the tree and actually managed to touch Luna, but she only climbed higher.

("Luna, it's a long way up there baby!" Clark wrote on Facebook.)

So Clark, terrified that the cat would succumb to dehydration in the summer heat, called professionals arborist who had pruned the tree weeks earlier.

“There were these two huge guys clamoring in a tree after this tiny cat for hours,” Clark recalled. “It would have been funny if I wasn’t terrified.”

But once again, Luna foiled her would-be rescuers and passed another night crying in the tree.

Clark turned next to social media where she got a tip — there are a group of people dedicated to the sole purpose of getting cats out of trees.

Cat In A Tree Rescue Service volunteers have been pulling cats out of trees since 1998, when founder Dan Kraus climbed to the top of an 80-foot-tall tree to save a cat that had been stuck there for five cold, rainy nights, according to the organization’s website.

Its rescuers have since saved more than 1,000 cats in 44 states, and nine foreign countries including Australia, China, Ireland and New Zealand.

Clark reached out to the organization’s Brooklyn-based volunteer, Joshua Galiley, who promised to come Friday evening. By that point, Clark and her two teenaged children had spent about 24 under the tree, holding a stretched out blanket beneath the skinny branches where Luna was stuck and hoping she wouldn’t fall.

Friday afternoon, Luna fell.

“It was one of those long kind of car crash moments,” said Clark. Children watched from their bedroom windows and neighbors stuck their heads out their back doors to see Luna fall forty feet and land, safely, into the blanket.

“It was a big sigh of relief,” said Clark.

The troublesome cat jumped out of the blanket and ran back in her house where she has remained for the past three days, said Clark, adding that the kitten is now hoarse from the crying but otherwise in good shape.

Clark posted an update on Facebook to alert her friends and neighbors that Luna had survived, and added that Luna kept biting her toes.

When a friend told Clark this was a sign of gratitude, Clark replied, with a laugh, “I just hate cats.”

Photo Courtesy of Natalie Clark