Hero Cat Found After Saving Owner From Parkdale Blaze
Posted February 4, 2009 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
He’s the unlikeliest hero in the entire city, an amazing champion who can neither speak nor carrying anything in his arms. And yet he was responsible for saving a lot of lives on Wednesday morning.
Whoever said a black cat is unlucky doesn’t know Domina. She’s the 3-year-old female feline who woke up a tenant in a semi-detached home on Spencer Ave. near King and Dufferin Sts. to warn the man sleeping soundly at 4am that the house was on fire.
The animal’s owner, Rob Smits, recalls getting the wake-up call he wasn’t expecting and being forced to react with little notice. “All of a sudden the cat jumped on me and woke me up and I smelled a bit of smoke and looked outside my window and a burst of flames came flying from the other window next door on the second floor.”
He woke up his two roommates and screamed at them to get out before it was too late. “I just grabbed my roommates and knew they were there and I said, ‘fire, fire!’ yelled it, called 911 and got the hell out.”
The blaze began in a second floor bedroom and quickly spread to the attic and an adjacent unit.
It took 70 firefighters to contain the blaze. The Fire Marshal’s Office is probing the cause and it’s too soon to say if there were working smoke alarms in the house.
Thanks to the fabulous feline, everyone made it out alive and unscathed. But the star of this show wasn’t there to take the credit. In all the confusion and panic, she disappeared, sparking a huge hunt for the hallowed hero.
She finally turned up late Wednesday night and is being temporarily housed at a Toronto Animal Control location until Rob can come and – appropriately enough – rescue her.
