Surrey Leader: Cat rescuer critically injured in Guildford fire

Animal Advocates Watchdog

In Response To: Woman in Critical Condition after Fire ()

By Dan Ferguson Staff Reporter Surrey Leader
Oct 14 2005
A Surrey woman who was critically injured in a Wednesday apartment fire was a well-known animal rights advocate who was probably trying to rescue her cats from the flames, friends said.
Beverly Parent, 50, was on life support in hospital Thursday, listed in critical condition with burns to nearly 90 per cent of her body following the fire, which also claimed the lives of 59 cats inside her suite.
The 12:35 a.m. blaze completely gutted her suite in the 13300 block of 105 Avenue
Parent was found by a neighbour just outside the door to her apartment.
A friend and fellow cat rescuer, Christine Hoffman said Parent was probably injured trying to get the animals out of her apartment.
"She said to me once that if she was ever in a fire, she would rescue every single one of her cats or die trying," a shaken Hoffman told The Leader Wednesday.
Donna Liberson of the Vancouver-based Community Animal Team Support group, or CATS, said Parent had moved to Surrey within the last two years after spending almost a decade rescuing cats in East Vancouver.
"She's an Earth mother type with a marvellous mountain of red hair," said Liberson.
"You could call her day or night and she would come to rescue a cat."
Liberson and Hoffman said Parent would pick up feral cats abandoned by their owners and get them spayed or neutered and re-socialized before adopting them out.
Despite housing as many as 75 cats, they both said Parent kept her place neat and tidy.
"You couldn't even smell a cat (when you visited)," Hoffman said, "(even though) there were cats on the bed, cats on the table."
Liberson complained the SPCA refused to allow her to get the tattooed serial numbers from the ears of the dead cats to check against a list of the more than 70 cats Parent was keeping at the time of the fire.
"There may be another 15 or 17 that got away and we want to be able to alert local vets," Liberson said, adding the SPCA refused to let her get a list of the tattoos.
SPCA spokesperson Lorie Chortyk said staff at the Surrey shelter halted Liberson's efforts when they discovered she wasn't related to Parent, the actual owner of the cats.
Chortyk said a full list would be provided to Liberson.
Fire investigators believe the blaze was accidental.