When my parents installed a forced air heating/cooling system in our house, I moved all the cats to a boarding kennel. No sense taking any risks with a curious cat stuck in ductwork.
It’s called, avoiding catastrophe.
No pun intended? ;^)
I have a personal story about a cat getting in duct work. I had just adopted a new kitty, and I had read that the proper way to introduce a new cat to a resident cat is to keep them for a while. Well, I put my new cat in my bathroom and went out for the night. When I got home that night, I go into the bathroom to check on her and she is nowhere to be found. I look at the vent in the floor and the vent cover had been taken off. Somehow this cat had gotten the cover off of the vent and crawled down into the duct work under the house. Well, it was the middle of winter when this happened and so we had to turn off the heat until she decided to come back out, because I didn’t want her crawling down close to the furnace and getting fried. This happened on a Saturday night and I didn’t get her back out until the following Monday night.