A Valencia woman is glad to have the family cat safely back in her arms tonight.

Hunter, a 5-year-old mixed feline, was rescued from the thin branches of a nearly 45-foot-tall tree on Via Adorna Monday afternoon.

Firefighters from Station 73 responded to the call for help more than 20 hours after the cat was spooked up the tree Sunday night.

“The cat is safe and sound,” Capt. Halverson from Station 73 said Monday afternoon.

Rescuing a cat that is stuck in a tree isn’t the type of call firefighters normally respond to because most of the time the cat will come down on its own, he said.

“We put tuna out and everything but he still didn’t come down,” said Carol Smith, who is taking care of the cat while her daughter Emily, the cat’s owner, is out of town.

“She has no idea this has all happened,” said Smith.

Smith believes it may have been a neighbor’s dog that spooked Hunter up the tree around 4 p.m. Sunday. According to Smith, Hunter’s never been much of a tree climber.

After several attempts to coax him down with a laser pointer and food, Smith made several calls to Animal Control and the Fire Department for help.

“They did a good job. I was truly worried about the fireman up there,” Smith said.

Fire officials say the rescue is a public service and the owners will not receive a bill for incident.

Neighbors caught the rescue on camera and shared it with SCVTV Monday afternoon. Watch it on SCV NewsBreak Monday night at 7 p.m. on SCVTV or online at SCVTV.com/news.