Health and safety has gone mad...... 20 fireman that's a little OTT

http://www.eadt.co.uk/news/leiston_amazement_as_five_fire_crews_sent_to_rescue_cat_1_854389

Assuming that all of the crew were on shift anyway, then what other costs would there be other than consumables such as fuel and milage for the appliances?

Also it is a real world exercise. Something that is not planned so anything could happen. I would regard it as additional training. Nothing more than that.

I've never really understood why firemen are called to rescue cats from trees etc.
Surely a friendly neighbour with a ladder would be more appropriate. It's hardly an emergency.
I used to have to get our old cat down from the pear tree all the time. Other cats chased her up there and then she couldn't get back down by herself again.

Even if sending the Fire Brigade is the right thing to do, sending so many is just silly.

Is it wrong that my first thought, regarding the reasons for this, was that the cat's owner was a rather tasty indiviual, stood in the front garden wearing a bikini?

Typical sensationalist headline - 5 crews were dispatched, but four were recalled when the local crew rescued the cat.

I saw this in the Metro and was surprised. Can't remember much about it now, given that it was the Metro telling the story but my first thoughts were that it was high enough for the cat to fall off and land on its feet, thereby surviving it.

I was going to suggest that all cats let out should be fitted with a piece of buttered toast on their back - that way, if they ever fell of/out of anything, they'd end up spinning harmlessly above the ground, but then I found this:

First the source of the forces must be understood. The force acting on the bread is not the butter, as some may think. Without the bread, butter wouldn't land bread side up, and therefore the force could not possibly be in the butter. We know the force is not the bread because it has been experimentally proven that bread does not land any particular side down without butter. The bread/butter force is caused by the fusing of bread and butter particles together. This fusion causes energy to be released in the form of shifting gravity and anti-gravity energy to opposite sides of the bread/butter continuum. The gravity energy naturally shifts to the butter since it is denser then the bread, while the anti-gravity energy shifts to the bread side.

The energy in a cat for landing on its feet comes from the feet themselves. This has been proven experimentally. Cats without feet have a near zero success rate of landing on their feet. We will call this energy cat foot energy.

Considering the equal but opposing bread/butter and cat foot forces one would expect the cat to spin violently about its axis. However the strength of these forces must be considered. A regular cat is not structurally stable enough to withstand the torque the spinning causes. I should not have to describe the way the cat's limbs give way, the way the legs wrench around until the feet are on the same side of the cat as the butter. And thus the cat can then land on its feet, butter side down.

We are now researching the possibility of using structurally reinforced cats for levitation systems, but so far the cost is too high to be practical. Several attempts at producing economically viable systems were made by separating the feet so that the instability of the cat would not be a factor. At first there was dificulty because there was no cat to tie the bread to. Later it was discovered that when not attached to a cat the feet lost their cat foot force over time. It is hypothesized that the feet need to be living to exert the cat foot force, and so far no practical method has been found for keeping the feet alive other than a cat.

Attempts are also being made to breed flat cats with no legs (only feet).

There are many other problems related with this method of levitation as you may well imagine, but they are beyond the scope of this discussion.

Harold G Sputsberry PHD
Institute for Alternative Energy Research
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PERPETUAL MOTION

When a cat is dropped, it always lands on its feet, and when toast is dropped, it always lands buttered side down. Therefore, if a slice of toast is strapped to a cat's back, buttered side up, and the animal is then dropped, the two opposing forces will cause it to hover, spinning inches above the ground. If enough toast-laden felines were used, they could form the basis of a high-speed monorail system.

In the buttered toast case, it's the butter that causes it to land buttered side down - it doesn't have to be toast, the theory works equally well with Jacob's crackers. So to save money you just miss out the toast - and butter the cats.Also, should there be an imbalance between the effects of cat and butter, there are other substances that have a stronger affinity for carpet.

Probability of carpet impact is determined by the following simple formula: p = s * t(t)/t? where p is the probability of carpet impact, s is the "stain" value of the toast-covering substance - an indicator of the effectiveness of the toast topping in permanently staining the carpet. Chicken Tikka Masala, for example, has a very high s value, while the s value of water is zero. t? and t(t) indicate the tone of the carpet and topping - the value of p being strongly related to the relationship between the colour of the carpet and topping, as even chicken tikka masala won't cause a permanent and obvious stain if the carpet is the same colour. So it is obvious that the probability of carpet impact is maximised if you use chicken tikka masala and a white carpet - in fact this combination gives a p value of one, which is the same as the probability of a cat landing on its feet.

Therefore a cat with chicken tikka masala on its back will be certain to hover in mid air, while there could be problems with buttered toast as the toast may fall off the cat, causing a terrible monorail crash resulting in nauseating images of members of the royal family visiting accident victims in hospital, and politicians saying it wouldn't have happened if their party was in power as there would have been more investment in cat-toast glue research. Therefore it is in the interests not only of public safety but also public sanity if the buttered toast on cats idea is scrapped, to be replaced by a monorail powered by cats smeared with chicken tikka masala floating above a rail made from white shag pile carpet.
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RETORT

This fails both under quantum physics and general relativity.

Under the quantum physics interperetation, since both the cat's feet and the buttered toast are equally likely to land on the floor, the cat-toast enters a superposition where both cat and toast are simultaneously on the floor until it is observed, at which point a radioactive particle decays, and the cat is skinned in a number of simultaneous, equally likely, yet distinct, ways.

Relativity predicts that the intense attraction to the floor will, in fact, bend space-time in such a way that the floor actually is in contact with both the cat and the toast. If the cat is of the black variety, then it will thus cross its own path, generate a singularity, and vanish in a puff of logic.

The debate continues, as attempts at experimental verification have thus far failed. Dr. Kibble at Princeton's IAS said "Look, have YOU ever tried to hold a cat still and strap some friggin' TOAST to its back?"

So non-news throughout then.