Forestville cat hunter among locals rescuing pets in Camp fire zone

'This is just a monstrous scale,' said Shannon Jay, a Forestville man who works as a National Park Service officer and rescues fire cats on his own time.|
CHRIS SMITH
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Forestville’s Shannon Jay, who following our fire of 2017 ventured out night after night and went to boggling lengths to catch suffering and terrifying cats, is in Butte County.

He’s having trouble believing the vastness and horror of the Camp fire.

“This is just a monstrous scale,” said Shannon, who works as a National Park Service officer and rescues fire cats on his own time. He expects that thousands of pet cats were scattered, injured or killed in Butte County, compared to the hundreds impacted by the Tubbs fire.

One of several Sonoma County cat rescuers in and near Paradise, Shannon rescued one cat from the chassis of an incinerated pickup as videographer Douglas Thron rolled his camera.

The video is hard to watch and to hear. Shannon said it took an hour and half for him to jack up the pickup and at last get a hand on the pitifully crying cat.

The video shows that he was overcome by emotion after he latches the injured gray cat into a travel crate.

“She’s alive and healing in the hospital,” he said.

You can reach columnist Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.

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