JudyJB wrote: Cats do not wait for politeness, so I can visualize them scattering.
Sometimes they do.
I knew a person - the father of a couple of my kids friends - who had cats. He lived at the time in a very nice rural area here in the lower Sierra foothills.
One night, for some reason he didn't understand, he woke up with all three cats on his chest, clawing him. He said they had never done that before, so it startled him, and woke him right up. Half-asleep, looking out the window, he could see brightness outside, so supposed it was time to get up, that he must have over-slept.
He hadn't.
His house was on fire, the front of his house totally involved, flames just the other side of his closed bedroom door. This fire was another bad one, the main difference from the Paradise fire is that not as many people live/ed in Loma Rica as live/ed in Paradise.
He took the few seconds it took to throw his cats out the bedroom window (luckily he kept his car keys in his bedroom, outside there was fire everywhere). The cats scattered (tried to catch them, couldn't), got in his car and roared away, flames on all sides.
The cats survived. His house, outside structures, neighbor's homes - all burned to the ground.
He said that if it were not for his cats, he would be dead.
Anne