We all love animals on ladders, and maybe some of you have even seen cat ladders built outside homes and flats to allow our feline friends access to the outdoors? They are becoming more popular and one Newcastle based kitty is loving his. The unusually named Jinx Ragnar Trappistini La Bonche (or Jinx for short) has his very own cat ladder giving him a route outdoors. The owners are circus performers, so Jinx knows a few tricks of his own and at just 18 months he seems to be the master of the cat ladder! Over in America one poor moggy was not so enamoured with heights. The tiny kitten was stranded on the edge of a bridge support on the I-95 in Richmond, Virginia. It is thought that the little tom kitten was dumped from a car and made his way to the edge of the bridge where he became stuck. Local police officer Kelly Morley was the first on the scene, after a woman reported hearing a cat meowing as if it were trapped. When emergency services realised there was a cat stuck on the bridge support the fire crews took over and rookie firefighter Betty Migliaccio was nominated to retrieve the poor cat. As it was her first save, first extended ladder rescue and first TV interview she will be treating her colleagues to a lot of cake and ice cream, as mandated by a long-standing tradition in the Richmond Fire Department. After climbing 75 feet up the ladder to rescue the kitten she managed to coax it into her mask bag and brought it safely to the ground. Officer Morley, who had watched the whole ordeal from the start, fell in love with the little kitten and decided to adopt him right away. That lucky cat still has eight lives left, but that was a close one! Firefighters don’t always use their ladders for emergencies though. One popular way of raising money for charity is the ladder-sit, which involves one firefighter spending a set amount of time in the ladder bucket in return for donations and sponsorship. In Amherst, Massachusetts, 39-year-old Leon Burke is spending 100 hours in the ladder bucket, raised over seventy feet in the air. At the halfway point he had already had to be lowered due to thunderstorms, but remained in place, watching films on his laptop and doing puzzles. The Amherst fire department hopes to raise around $18,000 for muscular dystrophy, a cause for which the department has been raising money since 1964. Normally, firefighters are the ones rescuing people from burning buildings, but one family in Denver, Colorado had to rescue themselves from their burning home using a rope made of bed sheets knotted together. It’s an escape method often seen in films, so it’s no surprise that the family decided to try it out. When a local news station tested the method with the help of local fire crews they discovered that the family was incredibly lucky to have survived the climb, as in all their tests the knots came undone and the anchoring of the makeshift ladder can also be a problem, as without something immoveable as the anchor, the sheet-ladder will not hold. This test inspired local residents to invest in and test their own escape ladders, with the Bagley family getting their young daughters to practice using the ladder on their swing set. The family now has an escape plan in case of fire and they are lucky that both the parents are tall, as they can lift the children down from the end of the ladder if they have to use it from a high-up window. In unrelated news, the Detroit Lions football team has been using a ladder to help improve their set plays and understand how each player is an integral part of these formations. Coach Jim Caldwell has been using the technique for years, starting out by climbing a tall step-ladder with a handheld camera to get a higher vantage point from which to film. They have since evolved the procedure and use a wheeled stand to make it easier to film all around the pitch. The resulting footage gives the players a better understanding of where they are in relation to the ball during set plays, and they hope that it will improve their quarterback’s performance, as he has faced criticism recently. Check back next month for a better vantage point on the ladder-related happenings around the world.