Adventurous cat needed rescue after getting stuck in Guelph tree

Cat rescued from Guelph tree A passerby spotted a cat trapped in a tree and described to Ashley Bacon the efforts to get it down.

Rebecca Adam was driving along a residential Guelph street when she spotted something high up in a tree.

“I slammed on my brakes,” she explained. “[I] looked up and noticed it was a cat... so we pulled over.”

Adams would soon discover that getting the adventurous feline down was not going to be an easy feat.

Over the next two hours, she contacted the local fire department and non-emergency phone number for police, and then she turned to social media.

An arborist finally answered her call for help.

“I am so grateful because I put hours of my day into this, I called all these services that you would assume would help you and none of them would,” Adams explained. “Then here’s a bystander who just has a business… it’s a Sunday and he’s like: ‘Yeah, I’ll come by.”

Joe Legate owns JL's Tree Service and said it was his way of giving back to the community.

“This cat happened to be in a front yard tree, and [it] looked fairly accessible,” he said. “I took my two older boys with me so it was a good experience for them too.”

Turns out it wasn’t Legate’s first time wrangling cats and critters out of treetops. Since 2014, his team has helped dozens of pet owners retrieve their beloved animals. Legate said he’s never charged a fee for the services.

“Over the years? I think we’re in the 50 to 60 range, for how many times we’ve gone up and got a cat out of a tree. We’ve actually got the same cat out twice,” added Legate.

Brendon Seguin, a crewmember at JL's Tree Service, said it feels great helping people out. However, there have been a few calls that were a little intimidating.

“Every time I treed to go higher to grab the cat it went higher, and it went as high as it possibly could go,” he explained. “It was just a little freaky in a dead tree, but we got it down and it was safe, so it was good.”

This time around, the cat was turned over to the Humane Society in Guelph to be looked over by the team.  The cat was then successfully returned to its human family on Monday.