Cat call

This Boston Globe AP article tells a story that would have been hard to believe, even if it had been about a dog. But a cat, making a 9/11 call to save its owner? And yet that seems to have been just what transpired in the case of one Ohio man and his faithful feline, Tommy.

Police aren't sure how else to explain it. But when an officer walked into an apartment Thursday night to answer a 911 call, an orange-and-tan striped cat was lying by a telephone on the living room floor. The cat's owner, Gary Rosheisen, was on the ground near his bed having fallen out of his wheelchair.

Rosheisen said his cat, Tommy, must have hit the right buttons to call 911.

"I know it sounds kind of weird," Officer Patrick Daugherty said, unsuccessfully searching for some other explanation.

Rosheisen said he couldn't get up because of pain from osteoporosis and ministrokes that disrupt his balance. He also wasn't wearing his medical-alert necklace and couldn't reach a cord above his pillow that alerts paramedics that he needs help.

Daugherty said police received a 911 call from Rosheisen's apartment, but there was no one on the phone. Police called back to make sure everything was OK, and when no one answered, they decided to check things out.

That's when Daugherty found Tommy next to the phone.

I was thinking this was some sort of strange fluky coincidence, trying to picture the chain of circumstances. Let's see: the cat accidentally knocks the receiver off the hook, walks over the phone and by chance happens to press a speed dial that happens to have been programmed to call 9/11.

But then, towards the very end of the text, the article divulges that this was no fluke at all: the owner had originally trained the cat to call 9/11.

I think that this fact is just as astonishing (maybe even more so) as my original assumption that the cat called 9/11 by accident.