I’ll be honest: This video is hard to watch.
In early October, members of the Spencerport (N.Y.) Fire District were called to a report of a cat stuck in a tree. The action they chose at the scene was to use a straight stream hose (some call it a deck gun) to knock the cat out of the tree where they had several people waiting below to catch it. What should have been obvious and predictable was that a housecat hit with a straight stream is going to be seriously hurt by the impact of the water and is not going to fall straight down. Instead, it was flung dozens of feet sideways where it fell to the ground. The badly injured animal was euthanized a day later.
Rescuing cats in trees is a folkloric stereotype for firefighters. Some departments do not respond to this type of call; though, some still do. Another cliché among firefighters is the reason some give for refusing to make this kind of response: have you ever seen a cat skeleton in a tree?
It’s true that most — though, not all — cats in trees can safely get themselves back down. The bigger issue in whether to provide resources for this type of call is what the cat’s owners may or may not do in response to their pet’s distress. In my department, the reason we treated a dog through the ice as a true emergency was because we knew that if we waited 15 minutes, we’d be dealing with a dog … and a person through the ice.
Responding to animal emergencies is part of most firefighters’ job description. Get a few firefighters together and they will play “Can you top this?!” with stories about bizarre animal rescues. One of my most memorable we nicknamed the Rocky Racoon Rescue after responding to a racoon that had fallen down a chimney into a bricked-over fireplace that now accommodated the vent pipe from a woodstove. Fortunately, the stove was not burning at the time of the incident, and the racoon was successfully extricated, with a little entertaining drama along the way.
The reason that firefighters and animals go together is because people and animals are so intertwined. People love their pets, and the media loves stories about pet rescues with happy endings. A recent rescue of a dog that went over a cliff in San Francisco made national news. Whenever emergency responders make one of these successful rescues, the media heaps praise on them and the general public responds in kind. Having firefighters blow a cat out of a tree with a straight stream — not surprisingly — has had the opposite effect.
If fire departments don’t want to be called to certain types of incidents, they should work with their dispatch centers and communities to come up with reasonable alternative responses and not be dispatched in the first place. But, if you respond, you need to do something positive once you are there.
A couple years ago, the San Diego Fire Department responded to a cat in a tree and they turned it into a ladder training session for their probie firefighter who safely rescued the cat. It was a winning situation all around. Does the SDFD have more critical problems they must respond to than a wayward cat? Of course. But a firefighter’s job isn’t just responding to The Big One. It’s serving the community in 1,000 different ways, both large and small. Part of what I found great about the job was the fact that we never knew from shift to shift what would be asked of us.
I don’t know what those firefighters were thinking the day they chose to use a straight stream to remove a cat from a tree. They certainly weren’t thinking about the welfare of the animal. They weren’t thinking about the feelings and needs of the people who called for help.
Don’t let this be your department’s legacy
The department has formally apologized and the firefighters involved might have been disciplined. But that video is out there and will be forever attached to that department. It’s important to remember that every action taken on an emergency response becomes part of your organization’s history and identity, especially in this era of cell phones and TikTok. What you choose to do is being watched, recorded and remembered. What do you want your legacy to be?
