German Shepherd Ends Up Stuck in a Tree After Chasing Cat All the Way into Branches
When your dog is on a leash, you have some semblance of control. If you have a well-behaved and well-trained dog, the leash is mostly for the sake of appearances, but if your dog lacks manners and resolve, that leash is the only tether keeping your pup from becoming a complete unholy terror.
Many dog owners trust their pets to respond to them whether or not there’s a leash, but every dog has its breaking point. For German shepherd “Baby,” it was a cat that proved too much to ignore and she managed to get out of her owner’s grasp.
The spritely 2-year-old pup saw a cat and, as dogs are wont to do, she chased it. Straight up a tree.
No, Baby was not standing at the base of the tree barking at a cat perched in the branches: Baby was in the branches, high above the ground, the cat balancing farther out on the branch than the dog was willing to go.
“I was so scared … that dog is my baby,” Thurston told KCPQ. “She’s everything to me.”
Thurston was shocked to see her dog silhouetted against the cloudy sky, seemingly unafraid of the distance she’d put between herself and solid ground.
“And I looked up and was like, ‘oh my gosh, she’s going to fall,’” Baby’s worried owner said.
Thurston did what most people would do: She reached out to her neighbors for help — but this was more than civilians could handle.
“So I called all my neighbors and was like guys, help me, you know,” she explained. “And somebody suggested I call the fire department.”
Thankfully, the Lathrop Manteca Fire Department answered the call and managed to help Baby and Thurston.
“You may have heard that our firefighters get cats out of trees, but what about dogs?!?!” the fire department wrote on Facebook on Saturday. “Right after Truck 30 and Engine 35 dropped off Santa that was exactly their next call.”
“Glad to hear that all turned out well for this pooch, and we are all pretty sure he’ll think twice about chasing cats up the next tree…nice work Engine 35!”
“It’s not your typical everyday call,” Firefighter Marty Ortiz told KCPQ. “We were able to get the ladder up there and I made my way up and I was able to grab the dog’s leash right away which was actually tangled up on a limb.”
The photos and videos were posted online and in response, cat-lovers made their voices heard by demanding to know what happened to the poor, terrified feline. Some even went so far as to accuse the fire department of only being dog lovers and caring about Baby in their comments.
Well, once firefighters rescued the dog, the cat climbed down without any help from anyone.
“It’s still running around here antagonizing her every day,” Thurston said of the cat. Perhaps the cat wasn’t such a hapless victim after all.
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