Viral Cat-Content

On 1 April 2025, the South Tyrol Regional Fire Service Association posted the above image of a cat-rescue drone. As it’s soooo obviously AI, I’ve cheekily nicked it.

Quite a few fire services now use drones for animal rescue, not for transport, but primarily to locate the animals.

Recently, a video of a cat rescue from China went viral online. There had just been some pretty severe flooding in China. A cat had taken refuge in a tree, right next to a bridge. A rescue wasn’t possible – the current was too strong, meaning even a rescue from a boat would have been too dangerous. A passer-by posted about it, along with a video from his drone as he flew past.

Then things started to happen:

And here’s the backstory that you won’t find anywhere else: Mr Wang, CEO of DJI, happened to come across the first post by chance. He set the marketing team racing to track down the bloke who’d posted the video online. And to give him a drone so he could get the cat out of the tree. Not one of those tiny, cheap ones. More like the drones costing five-figure sums in euros. And they got hold of a box treated with pheromones, so that the cat would actually decide to jump into it. And quickly, too, because the water was rising and the wind was no slouch either.

The rest is history.

Oh yes – the drone pilot was allowed to keep the drone.

There are a few other aspects that are only indirectly related to the story. The Chinese government is desperate to persuade DJI to build military drones. But DJI doesn’t want to; Wang is stubborn. So the Chinese government came up with the brilliant idea of banning drones in Beijing. All in the name of safety and suchlike. The whole operation was therefore also a sort of trolling the government.

Why doesn’t the word ‘DJI’ appear anywhere in the video? Anyone in the know will, of course, recognise the drone and the remote control. And that’s quite enough. Nobody needs to know that DJI played the white knight here. Nor is it really anyone’s business that Wang had a hand in it.

Regarding the audio: in the original, there’s a song playing in the background that’s protected by US copyright. The Chinese uploader obviously didn’t care. I’ve replaced the audio with a song by the Silly Strings – a band from Neumarkt.

How do I know all this, given that DJI hasn’t published it anywhere? Sorry folks, source protection. Someone from somewhere just let it slip…

Update: An observant viewer pointed out to me that three people wearing DJI T-shirts are actually visible. From 00:49.