By Shawn Doherty
The Capital Times
MADISON, Wis. — Local firefighters have a new tool to help save lives — oxygen masks for pets.
Don’t scoff.
Pets today are important members of many American families, and firefighters dash into burning buildings to rescue them along with their owners. “Our number one priority at any fire is saving lives, and saving lives doesn’t mean just humans,” says Che Stedman, a 14-year veteran of the Madison Fire Department. “It is the best feeling in the world to walk out of those flames with something living in your arms. Especially when somebody who loves them dearly comes running up to you in gratitude.”
The Madison Fire Department’s eight ambulances have had the masks for several years now, but a number of other local fire departments just received donated kits with the masks and training in how to use them last weekend, part of a push by the Wisconsin Veterinary Medical Association and a pet product company to equip fire departments across the state.
Each kit has three different sizes of pet masks designed to fit over snouts and even beaks without letting oxygen escape, which is what happened in the past when firefighters attempted to save animals with human oxygen masks or even with mouth-to-muzzle resuscitation. “They are sized for anything from a parakeet to a large dog and everything in between,” says Lorie Wirth, public information officer for the Madison Fire Department.
The U.S. Fire Administration doesn’t count the number of pets killed by fires, but experts with Invisible Fence Brand, the company donating many of the kits, estimate the toll could be as high as 40,000 to 150,000 each year. Most of these animal victims, like humans, die from smoke inhalation.
Local fire departments don’t track what happens to pets, either. Last year, Madison firefighters responded to 23,529 calls, more than three quarters of them for medical crises. A relatively small number of the calls, 212, were to put out fires in homes or buildings. Until a tragic condo fire this summer killed a 46-year-old woman in a home lacking smoke alarms, nobody had died in a Madison fire since 2007. But Wirth guesses one or two animals are lost in fires in the city each year, while about a dozen dogs and cats are retrieved.
Also plucked recently from city blazes were a boa constrictor and baby alligator. The firefighter who rescued the latter, now called “Gator Man” by some of his colleagues, didn’t use a mask on the creature, Wirth says. “But he sure used gloves,” she says.
The push to equip local emergency responders with oxygen masks for pets is a result of what experts say is a national trend to treat pets as members of the family. No longer are they mere farm hands or domestic servants acquired to help chase mice or herd cows, explains Dr. Lara George, a veterinarian with Country View Veterinary Service in Oregon. “There’s been a real evolution in the way we think about our animals,” George says. “A lot of animals were initially just there to do a job. Nowadays they are companions and part of the family.”
The pet welfare movement gained power after Hurricane Katrina when many in the country were horrified not only by the human suffering but by the plight of tens of thousands of stranded pets as well. In 2006, a congressman moved by a film clip he saw of a sobbing child forced to part with his pet dog, Snowball, helped to pass legislation that now requires local disaster agencies to plan not just for the emergency housing of people but for the care of their pets, too.
Local firefighters say they see the powerful attachment between pets and their owners all the time. The number one reason people try to rush back into burning homes, they report, is not to salvage grandmother’s precious jewels or treasured photos. It is to rescue pets. “A lot of people are killed going back in,” says Scott Miller, deputy chief of the McFarland Fire Department, which received some of the new pet masks last weekend.
Firefighters are trained to restrain the frantic pet owners. They are also told not to risk their own lives when rescuing pets - though that can be an individual decision and judgment call for firefighters, many of whom own pets themselves. “I don’t put the same value on a pet as I do an individual,” Miller says. “But I understand for some people that’s very difficult. A lot of people consider pets close family.”
The lock pets hold on our affections - and the dramatic lengths we now go to save them during local disasters - is apparent when browsing the city’s routine and otherwise dry fire reports.
Take this account of a fire last summer on Madison’s East Side: “Shortly before midnight on Friday, August 6th, a fire broke out at a 4-unit apartment complex causing $250,000 in damage, displacing eighteen people. When firefighters arrived, smoke and flames were billowing from a second story patio and balcony... A mother from Apartment #4 helped her two young sons exit the building. She returned to the apartment to retrieve her dog, but when she opened her apartment door, she saw smoke and flames in the hallway, blocking the stairs. She shut her apartment door, went to the farthest bedroom, got the dog to the ground, then hung from the second story window and jumped. She and the dog were not injured.”
Heroic or foolish? Both, firefighters say. And maybe not even necessary. Animals have an uncanny ability to survive these conflagrations. While several pets were killed in a major 35-unit apartment fire in 2007, hours after the blaze firefighters were still pulling scared pets from the wreckage. Animals do better than humans in these disasters in part because they are lower to the ground, where noxious fumes are not as dense. “One of the things we run into more frequently than anything is people who say they won’t leave without their pets,” Wirth says. “But we’re not suggesting that you abandon them to something horrifying. Most of the times animals come out of these fires pretty well.”
Indeed, that same report recounting the mother’s rescue of her children and dog notes: “Four cats were reunited with their owners after firefighters retrieved them from the building.”
Get yourself out of the house, firefighters say, and let them rescue your pets. They have the experience, the protective gear and equipment, and now even oxygen masks for critters.
Copyright 2010 Madison Newspapers, Inc.