Fire victim! Tahlia after making an extremely fortunate escape from the paddock burnoff
81This is the video of what Tahlia had to run out from - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fZ0N5NvNm8
A pair of our wildlings / rehabilitated cats have a habit of spending the day in empty paddock next door ( long grass ); today however started with there being a fuel load reduction burnoff over the hill. Multiple times we went out to try call in both the wildlings as we presumed they might have been out there but to no avail and essentially had to wait for the fire front to start approaching (we're talking 15m from the house here ) and they'd run to us for safety, this represented the last tiny segment of the entire field.
Simba ( big ginger boofhead who approaches the camera ) did run clear as planned, however before Tahlia could, the F@#%*@#()ing fire wick holder started lighting the grass upwind, instead of letting the fire slowly progress into the headwind for the last portion, subsequently Tahlia got caught between the two fire fronts and was boxed in a wall of fire along with several other animals including a couple of kangaroos. It's not a big area, perhaps a section 30m x 30m triangle, but the people managing the fire decided to get impatient it seems.
While I agree the cats shouldn't have been out there, these are wildlings being rehabilitiated, so it's not so easy to (yet) fully constrain them given our limited resources [ we've desexed and chipped them, and they are human-social ], they typically spend the evenings within our property that's fenced for reasonable protection.
Tahlia has both back feet with some unknown level of burn, though at least she's (tenderly) walking on them. Her fur is burned back quite a bit and she has no whiskers left :-o