Save Something Small

Filmmaker Katharine Parsons ’74 tells the story of the animal rescuers who braved the California wildfire burn zones to reunite beloved pets with their families.

By Melissa Babcock Johnson

wildfire engulfs your neighborhood in the middle of the night. The flames are moving eight feet a second. The power is out, so you can barely see. There’s no time to grab much, maybe not even your shoes. You call your dog, who dutifully follows you to the car as your family escapes.

But your cat is nowhere to be found. For thousands of residents of Northern California, this nightmare was reality.

As the Tubbs Fire ignited in October 2017, Katharine Parsons ’74 was far from the flames, at home on her 87-acre horse farm an hour north of Toronto and working on her third screenplay. Parsons, who studied chemistry at Conn, had recently retired from her acupuncture practice. She was looking forward to lots of time to write.

She had completed a novel but had enjoyed dabbling in film in high school, “before they were digital, when you were splicing and pasting things together,” she recalls, and wanted to learn screenwriting to adapt her book. She took an online course and got “absolutely hooked.” In 2017, Parsons earned a master certificate from the acclaimed ScreenwritingU program and created her film company, Ravenshoe Media.

“Screenwriting melded my ability to write with my interest in photography and film,” says Parsons, who had previously done some photojournalism work covering the four-eyed fish of the Galapagos Islands.

But cats, not fish, would drive her most prolific project to date.

Parsons was scrolling through Facebook one day when she came across real-time status updates by a fellow filmmaker friend about a wildfire in California. It was the Tubbs Fire, which would ultimately burn nearly 58 square miles and destroy 5,643 structures, half of which were homes in Santa Rosa, a city an hour north of San Francisco. It would become the most destructive wildfire in California’s history—until the Camp Fire a year later, which was four times worse.

Then Tucker the feline appeared on her social media feed. “My friend started posting all these lost animal stories,” Parsons recalls, and the one about a badly burned cat brought into Sonoma County Animal Services by a Pacific Gas and Electric Company worker caught her attention.

In just an hour, Tucker’s photo had been shared hundreds of times and his family was located. More reunions followed. Families whose neighborhoods had been incinerated held out hope, posting photos of their missing pets—mainly cats—as agencies shared photos of pets rescued from the burn zone. Volunteers around the world began to match them up.

“Some weren’t microchipped or, if they were, the phones linked to the numbers associated with the chips had burned with the homes, so they were relying on the public,” Parsons explains. “It became Facebook’s largest lost pet initiative in their history.”

Parsons couldn’t take her eyes off the screen. “I put aside the screenplay I was working on and I just became glued to the stories about these cats.”

And the idea for a documentary was born.

It became Facebook’s largest lost pet initiative in their history.

Katharine Parsons ’74

Rescuer Shannon Jay with cat trap in Paradise, California, following the Camp Fire of 2018.

THE FIRE CATS

Parsons says Tucker was the catalyst for her 80-minute film, The Fire Cats: Save Something Small, which follows volunteer rescuers like Shannon Jay, a police officer for the National Park Service who spent countless hours of his own time in the burn zone rescuing cats or leaving them food and water. Parsons relied on donated recordings from first responders and rescuers to complete the story, as she first went to California seven months after the Tubbs Fire. Even after all that time, cats—ever resilient—were still being rescued.

Lea Stockham was 15 when the Tubbs Fire hit. She was the primary caregiver for Thomas, a cat who’d been with the family since Lea was a toddler. As the Stockhams prepared to flee their Santa Rosa neighborhood, Lea grabbed Thomas, but he squirmed out of her grip and bolted.

Lea’s dad returned to look for Thomas only to find bones and a burned tail where the porch once stood. The family buried the remains and held a funeral a week later. Lea was overcome by guilt for being unable to save her beloved cat—a heavy burden at her young age, Parsons says.

Forty-four days after the fire, Jay trapped a miraculously unscathed cat with a microchip. It was Thomas. He had traveled a quarter mile through underground pipes to find safety.

“Only about 1-2% of cats and about 20% of dogs are microchipped,” Parsons says. “If you have a microchipped pet and you keep your phone number updated, it’s a matter of minutes to get that pet back. And if you don’t, the chances are almost zero.”

She adds, “People always think of cats as being independent and aloof. But psychological studies show cats bond with their people precisely the way babies do with their mothers. It’s just as important to get the cat back to their family as it is for the family to get the cat back.”

In the film, Lea pets a contented Thomas. Through tears, Lea’s mother, Dani, says, “I remember one of the things Lea said: ‘I can tell that he forgives me.’ And that helped her forgive herself.”

We simply have to give animals equal standing with other members of the family.

Katharine Parsons ’74

Left: "Thomas," rescued 44 days after the Tubbs Fire, reunited with owner Lea Stockham. Right: "Mama Cat," in bandages after being rescued from the Camp Fire, 2018

HELL IN PARADISE

The Fire Cats was originally going to be a short. But when the Camp Fire ignited in November 2018, the Northern California city of Paradise turned into hell. Parsons flew out five months later. “It was very important for me to see that devastation firsthand,” she says. “Paradise was just wiped out.”

The volunteer rescuers from the Tubbs Fire had climbed into their cars and driven three hours north to help in Paradise. Their efforts, which had been welcomed in Santa Rosa, were dismissed this time. The local official rescue organization, North Valley Animal Disaster Group, informed them their assistance wasn’t needed—they had their own people.

“The first half of the story is pretty happy,” Parsons says. “Authorities were letting the rescuers in after Tubbs. These were hometown heroes who were well-known; even the police force recognized their importance. But it became a darker story in the second half. Why would you not welcome skilled rescuers who are going to save you money and save you time?”

The answer, Parsons says, lies in how animals are classified. While cruelty against animals is a federal crime, in most states animals are legally on the same level as a car or a refrigerator—property, not family. And after a large-scale disaster, human life takes priority.

“That’s why animal rescuers are barred from the burn zones, which are very dangerous places,” Parsons explains. “There are liability issues. The ground underneath is still actually burning. Officials want people out of there so they can do their work—because they can’t prioritize animals. We simply have to give animals equal standing with other members of the family. It’s an important issue, and one I tried to build into the film.”

In Paradise, the call of the suffering animals was louder than that of the authorities, and rescuers went in anyway. Jay spent more than an hour jacking up a truck that had burned and collapsed so he could crawl underneath, on broken glass, to rescue Mama Cat. He rescued another, Stoic, five months after the fire. Parsons adopted him. “I brought him back to Canada, which Stoic didn’t really appreciate because he was a California boy,” she jokes.

Dozens of fire cats appear in the film in various states of distress and injury. Some were found in the burn zone months after anyone thought anything could survive. Cats with microchips or ones matched up through Facebook were almost all reunited with their families. Others were adopted by new owners after spending months healing from burns. Some were euthanized by authorities. All are honored in the credits at the end of the film.

Aerial shot of mobile homes in Paradise, California, destroyed by the Camp Fire, 2018.

The movie doesn’t just tell the story of a couple of cats; it tells a broader story around humanity and how we interact with disaster.

Mac Stevens ’00

A FAMILY AFFAIR

Since its release in 2022, The Fire Cats: Save Something Small has earned 27 film festival awards, including Best Inspirational Film and Best Original Song at Cannes World Film Festival, Semifinalist at Flickers Rhode Island International Film Festival, and Best of Fest for the Animalis Fabula Film Festival. It also boasts an impressive 9.8/10 IMDb rating.

Parsons, who calls the honors “the icing on the cake,” credits two other Conn alums for their work on the film—her children, Mac Stevens ’00 and Lili Strawbridge ’23.

Stevens served as the sound editor, while Strawbridge is credited for her work on the production crew. She provided creative input and voiceover work, conducted interviews, and, along with Stevens and his two children, recreated scenes of residents fleeing from their homes. She also spent about a week in the Paradise burn zone, accompanying Jay on nighttime stakeouts.

“Shannon had traps set up and night vision cameras linked to his phone that were tripped by sensors. Sometimes we would be sitting in the car for hours just waiting, hoping the cat would come out,” says Strawbridge, who Parsons calls an amazing cinematographer and “cat wrangler.”

For his part, Stevens made good use of the audio-visual skills he honed at Conn. “I think he probably lived over in Palmer Auditorium, so he knew a lot more about sound than I did,” Parsons says. “And sound is at least 50% of a film.”

Stevens says he’s proud of what his family accomplished with Fire Cats.

“It doesn’t just tell the story of a couple of cats; it tells a broader story around humanity and how we interact with disaster.”

Shannon Jay in the Camp Fire burn zone in Paradise, California, in 2018. All images courtesy of Katharine Parsons.