Cats aren’t his favorite animal, but Larry Meadows managed to rescue two of them in one day this week

Larry Meadows says he’s never been much of a “cat person,” although he does own one that came to his and wife Lana’s Tecumseh home as a stray. “They’re just not my favorite animal,” he said late Monday afternoon.

With that kind of attitude, it seems a little unlikely that Larry, of all people, would end up going way out of his way to rescue a lame-brained cat that had gotten itself into trouble. And it’s even more unlikely that he would end up rescuing a second cat 25 miles away on that same day. After all, he’s not exactly known as the Cat Whisperer. But that’s what happened.

Rescue No. 1 began Sunday night when Larry posted a help-wanted notice on a Facebook yard sale site, seeking employees for his Meadows Lawn and Tree Service. The notice caught the eye of Karin Vaught’s friend who knew about the cat catastrophe going on at Karin’s house. That friend called another friend, asking if she knew anyone who knew how they might go about contacting Larry. And that friend called someone who called someone else who finally got Larry’s contact information and shared it with Karin – who called him and asked for help with her cat Miracle (nicknamed Little Bit).

Miracle is problem-prone, you might say. Hence his name. It’s truly a miracle he’s alive.

He landed in Karin’s life back in November when she was driving back from Gainesville to the home she shares with her husband, Randall, just south of the state line on Highway 5 in Arkansas. The Vaughts are the former owners of the popular Vaught’s Restaurant that operated for years near Highways 160 and 5 south near Gainesville. 

“I was coming up the hill in front of the dollar store, headed west, and this car is coming toward me. I saw them throw a Kleenex out the driver’s window. Then I saw the two cars behind that car swerve to miss the Kleenex. I’m slowing down, and I realize the Kleenex is bloody. But it’s not a Kleenex. It’s a kitten,” Karin recalled Monday morning. 

“I’m in my white Lincoln, and I do a U-ie like I’m a cop. I popped my door open, scooped up that kitten, looped back around and came on home. I held him in my coat; he was meowing all the way. He was hurt bad,” she said.

She sat holding him for four hours that evening, thinking, “He’s not going to make it.”

But the next morning the kitten was still alive, so she took him to John Bressett, a veterinarian in Midway, Arkansas, and told him, “If you can’t save him, you can’t save him. I understand. And I can’t spend a lot.”

The vet told Karin, “Leave him here; we’ll do what we can.”

Two days later, the office called her to come and get the kitten. He wasn’t out of the woods yet, but he was still alive. Miracle had earned his name.

He’s “more fur than body,” Karin says. He’s white and fluffy with a yellow tail and ears, and she’s pretty sure his near-death experience left him brain damaged. “He would lie there and meow, he was in so much pain. Then he would just turn round and round in circles. I had to lay a napkin over his head to block his eyesight so he would stop and eat,” she said.

Even now, five months later, Miracle’s still a little different. “He does go outside sometimes with the other cats. They seem to know he’s special needs, and they kind of look out for him.”

Friday afternoon, she realized Miracle wasn’t in the house and started looking for him outside, calling everywhere. “Then I heard something – meow, meow,” she said. 

She finally spotted him 30 feet up a huge oak tree alongside their driveway. She called and called, but Little Bit wouldn’t budge. “We put out food, water, treats. We kept calling. But he just sat up there and meowed,” she said.

One of her other cats, Big Boy, climbed the tree trying to help, she said. “He went up on Saturday, meowed at him and showed him how to get up and down – and then fell down himself,” she said. “Sunday he did it again. He rubbed noses with him, sat on another limb, like he was telling him, ‘You gotta follow me.’ This was truly a cat who knew another cat was in trouble. But Big Boy had no luck. Miracle was doomed to spend a second night in the tree. That’s when Karin wrote a Facebook post asking if anyone knew anyone who might help.

When she connected with Larry a few hours later, he sighed and said, “Call me if he’s still there in the morning.”

Larry told the Times he didn’t sleep well Sunday night. He said he didn’t know if it was because his shoulder was killing him – or he was dreading the cat rescue. Sometime around 6 a.m. Monday, he called Karin. Yes, she told him, the cat’s still in the tree. He’d been there since Friday. 

Thirty minutes later, Larry pulled into the Vaughts’ driveway. “This is my first cat rescue,” he told them. “I think I’m doing the fire department’s job.”

Larry expected to be clawed and bitten. After all, who knows how a starving, dehydrated, brain-damaged cat who’s afraid of heights will respond to an unknown human rising toward him in a huge bucket? 

“Just one little knick,” Larry said afterward. “He squirmed a little, and I held his feet, waiting for him to bite me. But he didn’t.” 

In just a few minutes, Miracle was safe in Karin’s arms, and Larry, having been profusely thanked, was on his way back to Gainesville, confident he’d done his good deed for the day.

He picked up his employees, brothers William and Brian Hill, and they headed to Tecumseh to drop off the bucket truck and get the company’s lawn-mowing equipment. It wasn’t really the day Larry had planned to mow Clear Springs Cemetery near Dawt. But then he thought, while he was so close, they might as well get it done.

As he mowed in front of the church “I saw something flopping around on the porch,” he said. “It was a cat. I thought at first it had got hit by a mower. Then I thought a snake had it. But we went to look, and it had gotten into a fishing lure.”

The three men stopped work and set about rescuing the cat, which tried to run from them but could only flop and roll across the grass, trying to find a place to hide. 

“It was a big lure, 6 inches long, that had three treble hooks,” Larry said. “The cat had the hooks stuck in its paws.”

They threw an old coat over the cat, and Larry and Brian began the extractions while William live-streamed their work on his Facebook page. Later, William set down the phone camera to help hold the squirming, yowling feline. 

The nine-minute video, now posted on the Ozark County Times Facebook page, shows the men using pliers and a crimping tool as they struggled to break the steel hooks so they could cut off the barbs and pull the main part of the hooks back out of the suffering cat’s feet. The suffering animal jerks, hisses and growls in their grip as the rescuers discuss where to try and cut each hook and then as they grunt and grimace with the effort of breaking the steel. But that part was easy, Larry said later, compared with trying to cut the lure itself in half to keep the middle treble hook from piercing the cat’s stomach. 

Finally, the work is finished. The men check each paw carefully one more time and then loosen their grip. The cat rockets away from them, hightailing it to the woods. 

“Cat had a fishing lure in its paws. We saved it. Have a beautiful day. God bless,” William says in the video as he holds the two halves of the lure in his hand.

Later Monday, Larry told the Times, “Be sure to say something about not leaving fishing lures laying around.” This wasn’t a scrawny cat, Larry said. “It had to be someone’s pet. A homeowner may have left the lure lying out, and the cat got to playing with it.”

The incident reminded him of a time when he was a kid and his sister was playing with a fishing rod, and their cat grabbed hold of the fishhook and swallowed it. “We had to put the cat down,” he said. “It was bad.”

After his two-cat-rescue 11-hour day, Larry got home about 4 p.m., musing about the unlikely way his Monday had turned out.    

“It’s been an interesting day,” said the small-town hero – who still insists cats aren’t his favorite animal.