VALLEY COTTAGE - For a week straight, Nancy Deacon-Owens and her neighbors heard a constant meowing at night.

Just down the street, a cat had made its way 50 or 60 feet up a tree. It turned out 3-month-old Blackie belonged to Owens’ neighbor, Doreen McQuillan on Christian Herald Road.

“I’m assuming either a truck or an animal or something must have chased it,” McQuillan said. “It’s been out before, but this is the first time this has happened. I’m sure it’s going to be the last.”

Together, with other neighbors in the area, McQuillan and Owens called fire departments, animal shelters and Clarkstown Animal Control Officer Pat Coleman with the hope that someone would get the cat down.

But no one came.

Cats typically come down after 24 to 48 hours, Coleman said, so town officials don’t respond to such calls.

After several days passed, however, McQuillan and Deacon-Owens were beginning to wonder if the cat would even survive.

Other people in the neighborhood came out and brought ladders, or food, to try to lure it down, but nothing worked.

“It’s been this whole sort of event,” Owens said. “It’s been a whole little community trying to save this cat.”

Finally, a representative from Ira Wickes, a tree service company, told neighbors it would send someone over for free.

Yesterday afternoon, Rich Hawkenberry, a foreman-climber with the company, reached toward the cat as old branches and twigs fell off the tree and bounced on the ground below.

It was the third cat rescue for Hawkenberry, who said he’s quickly becoming accustomed to the cat-rescuing technique.

“The cat did exactly what I thought it would do, run away from me,” he said, back on the ground and gathering his equipment. “It seemed pretty fearful, though we were trying to help it.”

His colleague then reached for the cat on the other side of the tree and managed to secure it in a white and blue pillowcase.

A happy McQuillan, meanwhile, whisked her cat back home to feed it and make sure it was healthy. But not before opening the pillowcase to take a peek and say hi.

Blackie looked up and meowed right back.

KINGSTON – A stray 6-week-old calico kitten who accidentally traveled from New Jersey to New Hampshire has been adopted.

When C.G. Shaffer of Raymond saw a newspaper article about the kitten’s journey up the East Coast in the underbelly of a Ford Explorer, she called the Kingston Police Department the same day.

Shaffer was one of about 75 calls inquiring about adopting the kitten, who the animal control officer had named “Jersey.” The frail female climbed into the spare tire compartment of a Ford Explorer and couldn’t find her way out, according to Chief Donald Briggs.

The kitten traveled in the compartment for nearly six hours and more than 300 miles Sept. 13. The elderly couple who owned the Explorer heard “meows” but couldn’t place where the sound was coming from. The couple stopped to eat in Connecticut, where they heard the crying again. The husband and wife kept driving and finally stopped in New Hampshire at Reynolds Trailers in Kingston, off Route 125, where they discovered the origin of the noise.

With the help of Reynolds Trailers’ employees, the Kingston animal control officer moved the spare tire down, carefully reached up and got the cat.

The animal control office did a background search on Shaffer to make sure she would be a good caretaker.

“They are very cautious before handing over an animal,” Shaffer said.

She received the call Thursday that the kitten was ready to be picked up.

“I won the prize,” she said.

The newly renamed “Phoenix” joins two dogs and another cat at the Shaffer home.

WHITE PLAINS - When he was 2 years old, Todd O’Neill’s mom remembers, he clambered out of his playpen and disappeared.

“I was frantic,” Dolores O’Neill recalled. “I even called the police.”

Before they arrived however, a neighbor came over with the toddler in hand. He had climbed over the fence into the yard next door.

O’Neill, now 39, has been climbing ever since.

“I’m pretty good at it,” he said, which is a good thing. As a tree surgeon, O’Neill climbs trees that tower above the largest homes, taking down dead limbs and branches. In the past 10 years he’s put his skill to another use, rescuing live cats from lofty heights in and around White Plains.

“I’ve rescued about 40 or 50 cats from trees, and one pit bull puppy,” he said with a grin. “Most people don’t know that pit bulls can climb. This guy was about 20 feet up.”

O’Neill was born and raised in White Plains. His heroics began when a neighbor’s cat was stuck about 50 feet up a 90-foot-tall oak tree.

“He’d been up there a couple of days, and they’d called the Fire Department but were told that they don’t rescue cats,” he said. “So they asked me if I’d give it a try.”

O’Neill put on his climbing harness, tossed a rope over a tree branch, grabbed a pillowcase and started climbing. Minutes later, the cat was in the bag and O’Neill was heading back to earth.

“He was pretty friendly, which was good because it was my first rescue,” the White Plains man said. “About 30 people were watching me, and they all cheered when we came down. I felt like Spider-Man.”

Since, then, largely through word-of-mouth, the man his friends call “Todd the Tree Guy” has been rescuing frantic felines. “I charge for tree work, but not for saving cats,” he said. “Sometimes people bake you a cake or give you cookies or something like that, but to me it’s just a way to help out. It gives me a sense of neighborliness.”

He’s rescued cats that were as high as 60 feet up, which to a cat, he figures, “would be like a 30-story building.”

When the Yonkers Fire Department blasted Treetop the tiger cat out of a tree with a high pressure hose last week, O’Neill was not especially impressed.

“That was a very barbaric way of dealing with the issue,” he said.

Cats usually will come down by themselves, O’Neill said, but if they’ve been in a tree for three days it’s time to go get them.

“They get dehydrated and disoriented and lose their sense of balance. Sometimes they holler because they’re excited or hungry,” he said. “Usually though, the owner is more frantic than the cat. A couple of times I’ve brought a cat down and when the owner let them loose they ran right back up the tree.”

Most of the time the cats are pretty easy to handle, he said, but “sometimes they get scared and flail around.”

“I’ve been clawed, scratched and bitten a few times,” he said. “Once I caught a claw right in the mouth. I just keep my vaccinations up-to-date and don’t worry about it.”

Obviously, he likes cats.

“Sure I do,” he said. “I have a cat - Simon. He’s just like me. He climbs the curtains, wicker chairs, whatever he sees.”

After picking up her paycheck from Allen’s Cleaning Service, Donna Brown got into her 2001 blue Pontiac Grand Am at 11 a.m. on Friday and began to drive her husband, Albert, to an auto parts store.

Albert, who lives with his wife, their daughter, LeEssa, and his wife’s mother, on Niles School Road in Pownal, repairs Chevrolet trucks at his house for a living, often to the tune of AC/DC. On Friday he needed to pick up a new part, a grinding cut off wheel disc, to fix one of his trucks. On Kocher Drive, near Kmart in Bennington, he also got a new best friend along the way.

“I saw something in the road but thought it was a paper cup or something,” Donna, 47, said Friday. “So I swerved to avoid it, but then I saw it crawling and thought it was a ferret or something. It wasn’t until I was right up next to it that I could see what it was.”

The car came to a screeching halt.

“Get it! Get it!” Donna remembered screaming at her husband who was reading a car magazine in the back seat.

“Get what?” Albert replied, unaware of the situation.

“The kitten! There’s a kitten in the road!” Donna screamed to the back seat.

“At that point, I whip open my door, jump out of the car, and run to the little guy as fast as I can while looking around to make sure I don’t get hit,” Albert, 39, said Friday in his living room, holding the still frightened fuzzy feline to his chest hours later. “I scoop him up in my arms, and people start yelling, ‘What are you going to do with him?’ and I knew right away that I was going to take it home with us.”

Witnessing motorists got out of their cars and applauded the proud new owner of what appears to be a 4-week-old, blue-eyed, Siamese kitten, with a long hair mix, according to Albert.

“At first I didn’t know if it had gotten hit or anything, he was meowing like crazy,” he said, “but he’s been running around the house all afternoon.”

On the car ride home, with the little white-and-gray haired kitten still shaking in his arms, Albert decided to name it Lucky Number Seven: Lucky that Albert and Donna found him and the seventh addition to the Brown’s cat family. Taz, Missy, Tigger, Chevy, Molly and Garfield now have a new little brother, Albert said, the last two also being unexpected surprises from his mother.

“He’s definitely going to have a real good home,” he said. “Our other cats have seen him and they like him.”

Albert could not believe someone left the kitten to fend for itself in heavy traffic. “Leaving a cat anywhere is senseless, but in the middle of the street like that, it’s totally crazy,” he said. “It’s like leaving a new born baby that’s completely defenseless. I don’t know how anybody could do that. I really don’t understand.”

Anyone hoping to find their own pet on Kocher Drive, a road Albert said he drives on everyday, better think again. Albert said he went back and combed the entire area on foot to make sure no other kitten was abandoned.

Getting Lucky Number Seven is also out of the question. “If I leave here without this kitten, my wife’s going to kill me,” Albert told a group of interested people.

Next up for the little guy is a trip to the veterinarian, Albert said. He said Monday that it is doing very well and has moved on from only drinking milk off Donna’s fingertips.

“He’s eating very well,” he said. “He’s playing, and, oh, he’s a little devil.”

A sleeping 12-year-old girl who was home alone fled a burning flat and then ran back in to save her cat.

A smoke alarm woke her after a car battery caught fire in the kitchen.

Kingston and Surbiton fire crews were called to the flat at Bramley House, Crescent Road, Kingston on Wednesday, August 1 at 1.18pm.

After safely evacuating the flat, the girl went back to retrieve her cat before a neighbour called the fire brigade.

She was taken to Kingston Hospital but later released.

The kitchen was totally destroyed and there was smoke damage to a bedroom and the bathroom.
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Crew manager Brennan Healey, of Kingston fire station, said: “Because the girl was sleeping the smoke alarm was crucial - she is only here now because of it.”

People who are allergic to cats may not have to get rid of their pets to find relief, if the findings of a new study hold up.

Tolerance to cats can be built up in allergic kids by placing increasing doses of standardised cat dander extract under the tongue, according to Spanish researchers.

In the medical journal Allergy, Dr Emilio Alvarez-Cuesta, of Hospital Ramon y Cajal, Madrid, and colleagues note that a first line step for people with cat allergy is to remove cats from the home. However, this is often rejected or is not entirely effective, leaving immunotherapy as the only treatment.

Immunotherapy is based on the idea that the immune system can “learn” to tolerate allergy triggers if it is exposed to gradually increasing amounts of the offending allergen, starting with tiny amounts that don’t cause an allergic reaction.

In sublingual immunotherapy, or SLIT, the allergen is placed under the tongue, where it is absorbed into the system.

To see whether SLIT using cat dander extract works for cat allergies, the researchers randomly assigned 50 allergic youngsters to get daily SLIT drops with increasing levels of cat allergen or inactive “placebo” drops for a year.

The participants were then “challenged” by spending up to 90 minutes exposed to allergens in a room in which a cat was housed.

Of the 33 participants who completed the SLIT course, 62 per cent showed a marked reduction in symptoms compared to their symptoms before treatment. They also showed improved peak expiratory flow values during exposure, and a reduction in skin test reactions to standardised cat extract. No significant changes were seen in the group that got placebo drops.

There were no reports of adverse reactions, and the investigators conclude the results suggest “that the cat SLIT used in this study was able to improve cat allergy based on natural exposure challenge”.

Meowmeow the cat probably learned a lesson in sneaking away from her owners after she had to make a cross-country flight to rejoin her family last month.

Hays animal control officer Pam Jones and her son, Tyler, ended up taking the cat with them to Memphis, Tenn. — where Tyler had a medical appointment — and were met at the airport by the parents of Meowmeow’s owners. The parents eventually delivered the vagabond cat to its family.

Meowmeow had wandered away while the Polk family stopped at a Hays motel June 5. They were en route to Fort Bragg, where the father needed to return to his military base after leave.

Unable to search longer than three hours for Meowmeow, the family left their name and phone number with the motel, the police and the animal shelter before leaving town.

When the cat showed up, Jones was summoned to get her from her hiding place in the motel laundry room, Jones said. She called the owner.

“He was like, ‘What are we going to do now?’ ” Jones said.

But Jones was able to offer for her son to escort the cat to Memphis.

“It just so happened that this cat got lost when we were scheduled to go back for follow-up,” Jones said.

After checking on what all would be necessary to get the cat on an airplane, the Polks wired money to cover the cost of getting a health certificate and airplane tickets for the cat, Jones said.

Then the trip began.

“The cat did not like the plane trip, especially take-off here in Hays,” Jones said.

But despite the cat’s dislike for the first part of the trip, she calmed down and was quiet in her carrier while they were at the Kansas City airport.

The Joneses had a six-hour delay in Kansas City because their plane from Hays arrived late and they missed their connecting flight. Nevertheless, Meowmeow was quiet in her carrier, Jones said.

“We spent six hours in the airport with this cat,” Jones said. “Nobody knew we had a cat. Either Tyler would take a walk and get some exercise or I would take a walk and get some exercise. Nobody knew in the Kansas City airport that we had a cat.”

Doreen Polk met Tyler and Meowmeow at the Memphis airport and took her from there, Jones said.

“Since then, I’ve heard from Doreen Polk, and the cat has made it to Fort Bragg,” Jones said.

A tiny kitten rescued from a car engine is set to get a new home.

The BBC Scotland news website revealed how the ginger kitten was found by driver Victor Gallacher when his engine was not making its usual purr.

Thought to be about eight weeks old, the kitten had climbed inside the bonnet in Aberdeen and had a city tour before its cries were heard.

The cat home now looking after the kitten has been inundated with offers, and will make a decision on Monday.

High volume

Mr Gallacher, 61, of Bucksburn, Aberdeen, had been driving for several miles across the city in his Rover 400 when he became aware of an unusual noise.

He stopped and rescued the unharmed but oily passenger.

The kitten is now being cared for at Mrs Murray’s Home for Stray Dogs and Cats and Re-homing Centre in Aberdeen’s Seaton area.

The BBC Scotland news website story about the rescue was viewed more than 155,000 times on Thursday, and it also featured on BBC television and radio.

However he was not claimed back - so will now be re-homed by one of the interested parties, which is why he has not been given a name by staff.

Assistant manager Vikki McRobbie said: “We have phonecalls and e-mails from all over the country.

“Because there was such a high volume of interest we are going to let people see the kitten and then decide on Monday.”

Staff and Mr Gallacher all said they thought the kitten would make someone a good pet.

Scientists in the Netherlands are endowing a robotic cat with a set of logical rules for emotions. They believe that by introducing emotional variables to the decision-making process, they should be able to create more-natural human and computer interactions.

“We don’t really believe that computers can have emotions, but we see that emotions have a certain function in human practical reasoning,” says Mehdi Dastani, an artificial-intelligence researcher at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. By bestowing intelligent agents with similar emotions, researchers hope that robots can then emulate this humanlike reasoning, he says.

The hardware for the robot, called iCAT, was developed by the Dutch research firm Philips and designed to be a generic companion robotic platform. By enabling the robot to form facial expressions using its eyebrows, eyelids, mouth, and head position, the researchers are aiming to let it show if it is confused, for example, when interacting with its human user. The long-term goal is to use Dastani’s emotional-logic software to assist in human and robot interaction, but for now, the researchers intend to use the iCAT to display internal emotional states as it makes decisions.

In addition to improving interactions, this emotional logic should also help intelligent agents carrying out noninteractive tasks. For instance, it should help reduce the computational workload during the complex decision-making processes used when carrying out planning tasks.

Developed with John-Jules Meyer and Bas Steunebrink, also at Utrecht, the logical functions consist of a series of rules to define a set of 22 emotions, such as anger, hope, gratification, fear, and joy. But rather than being based on notions of feelings, these are defined in terms of a goal the robot needs to achieve and the plan by which the robot aims to achieve it.

When robots are typically attempting to carry out a task, such as navigation, there are usually two approaches they can take: they can calculate a set plan in advance, based on a starting point and the position of the goal, and then execute it, or they can continually replan their route as they go. The first method is fairly primitive and can often result in the familiar scene of a robot bashing itself against an unforeseen obstacle, unable to get around it. The latter approach is more robust, particularly when navigating unpredictable, complex environments. But this method is usually very computationally demanding because it requires the robot to be continually searching for the best route from a vast number of possible paths.

Emotional logic can help get the best of both worlds by requiring the robot to replan its route only when its emotional states dictate. For example, in this sort of navigational task, “hope” would be defined in terms of the system believing (based on sensory data) that by carrying out Plan A to achieve Goal B, Goal B will be achieved. Conversely, “fear” occurs when the system hopes to achieve Goal B by Plan A, but it believes that Goal B won’t be achieved after performing Plan A. Using this sort of definition, “fear” can help the robot recognize when it’s time to try a new tack. “This changes its beliefs because the rest of the plan will not make its goal reachable,” says Dastani.

In essence, by attributing emotions to an agent’s current status, it’s possible to monitor the behavior of the system so that decision making or planning is only carried out when absolutely necessary. “It’s a heuristic that can help make rational decision-making processes more realistic and much more computable,” says Dastani. “The point is that here we continuously monitor whether there is a chance of failure.”

Other robots have been designed to mimic human expressions. But Dastani’s focus on how emotions might affect decision makes it different from many of the other projects on emotional, or affective, computing, such as MIT’s Kismet robot, developed by Cynthia Breazeal. With Kismet, like other affective robots, the focus is on how to get the robot to express emotions and elicit them from people.

Dastani’s emotional functions have been derived from a psychological model known as the OCC model, devised in 1988 by a trio of psychologists: Andrew Ortony and Allan Collins, of Northwestern University, and Gerald Clore, of the University of Virginia. “Different psychologists have come up with different sets of emotions,” says Dastani. But his group decided to use this particular model because it specified emotions in terms of objects, actions, and events.

Indeed, one of the reasons for creating this model was to encourage such work, says Ortony. “It is very gratifying for us that the people are using the model this way,” he says. Most of the time when people talk about emotional or affective computing, it’s at the human-interaction level, but there’s a lot of work to be done looking at how emotions influence decision making, he says.

“It cuts across a lot of philosophical debates about the nature of human emotion and, indeed, of human thought,” says Blay Whitby, a philosopher who specializes in artificial intelligence at the University of Sussex, in the UK. This is not a bad thing, he says, but many philosophers would probably view the notion of emotional logic as an oxymoron, he says.

Having 22 different emotions makes for a very rich model of human emotion, even compared with some psychiatric theories, says Whitby. But it will need to be able to resolve conflicts between different emotional states, and it needs to be practically put to the test, he says. “The devil is in the detail with this sort of work, and they specifically don’t consider multiagent interactions.”

Dastani says that incorporating multiagent interactions–those involving multiple robots or robots and humans–is on his to-do list. He notes that it’s only then that end users are likely to see the benefits of this emotional logic, in the form of more-natural robot interactions or through the responses of intelligent agents in automated call centers. Before that happens, these emotional states are more likely to function behind the scenes in more-mundane activities like navigation and scheduling tasks, Dastani says, but it’s still too early to predict when such as system would be commercially available.

Where there’s a paw there’s a way. That’s what business owner Janna Burhop has learned about rescuing cats.

Burhop started a cat rescue in the back of her vintage clothing shop 12 years ago and has been saving animals ever since. Her stockroom has grown into a non-profit shelter called Touched By A Paw Cat Rescue and Shelter, 182 W. Main St.

Unlike humane societies, which have to euthanize animals, Burhop’s rescue has never put down a cat. Burhop’s love of animals, faith and unconventional ways have allowed her to shelter or find a home for every cat that has crossed her path.

“It just happened. We call it a God thing,” Burhop said.

Because of the devotion of 50 volunteers, the shelter is spotless with no odor. Each cat gets its own cage Burhop calls a kitty apartment. A makeshift hammock, or a blanket suspended by hooks, is placed in each cage. Cats can be seen comfortably napping in them, with tails and paws leisurely hanging off the side.

“The hammocks save space and the cats love them,” Burhop said.

Burhop can house or rehabilitate just about any cat. A generous volunteer has opened her insulated garage to the cats with behavior problems. The cats with the worst health problems stay with Burhop in her home. Burhop is mother to a cat with club food, kidney problems and feline cerebral palsy.

Sickly cats are treated, no matter what the cost. Because a cat named Hobo has a heart condition and has to take expensive medication, he stays at the shelter full-time. A volunteer comes in to spend time with him.

When another cat came in with a hernia the size of a grapefruit, Burhop held a fund-raiser to raise the $1,400 necessary for his surgery. A woman later adopted the cat and sends the shelter pictures of him.

Although Burhop usually will only accept abandoned cats, she has made exceptions. When a man was dying of AIDS and had no family, Burhop took in the cat and helped place him in a home.

Burhop isn’t surprised she is running a cat rescue in back of her shop. When she was only 8 years old she rescued her first kitten and fed it with a doll bottle. With a difficult childhood, Burhop found comfort in cats. She would often huddle with them in a big blanket.

“They comforted me and repaired my soul. I owe them,” Burhop said. “God put domesticated animals on Earth to nurture our souls because they love us unconditionally.”

When Burhop first started her shop, Reflections of the Past, she started noticing all the abandoned cats in the alleys. Pretty soon she started setting up cages and adopting cats out to customers.

Now she has 35 cages and a community of support. Nursing homes have adopted some of the cats for their residents to play with and some area pet shops put the cats up for adoption. Approximately 22 families have agreed to foster cats in their homes until other homes can be found for the animals.

Burhop is aggressive at getting the cats adopted. She not only runs their pictures in the local newspapers, but writes a special poem about each cat. She also gives them names and describes their personalities in a humanistic way.

“Figaro is sleek and handsome and very serious about his mousies,” Burhop said. “Dane is a big doggy-cat and a marshmallow.”

Burhop said she tried to help pet owners find solutions when they need to get rid of their animals. She is reluctant, however, to take in a cat that an owner wants to surrender. When strays and abandoned animals come to the shelter, Burhop said they are making a step up. When a surrendered animals arrives, however, they are losing their family and warm home. One time a surrendered cat even refused to eat and died.

“ We stopped taking surrenders after that,” Burhop said.

Although it takes about $7,000 to $8,000 a month to run the shelter, the funds usually have a way of trickling in. Generous volunteers often mail checks in or donate food.

“Our goal is to be in our own building in three years. We are looking for someone to donate five acres of land in the Whitewater area,” Burhop said.