The mother cat returned to the burning house 5 times to carry out all her kittens...

Scarlett is not just a cat. This is mother with a capital M. Her courage, motherly love and devotion, I think, will make everyone think.

...On March 30, 1996, a fire started in an abandoned Brooklyn garage in New York. Firefighters arrived at the scene quite quickly, but during the extinguishing, one of the firefighters, David Gianelli, noticed a stray cat, which over and over again returned to the garage engulfed in flames, pulling out its newborn kittens one by one.

The world learned about Scarlett in the spring of 1996. The cat lived quietly with five month-old kittens in one of the old garages in Brooklyn. But on the night of March 30, someone set fire to the garage. Arriving firefighters found out that there were no people in the garage at the time of the fire, but drew attention to a cat that rushed into the burning garage over and over again. The firefighters wanted to catch the kamikaze cat, but the animal did not fall into their hands. Suddenly one of the firefighters noticed that the kitty was carrying a kitten in her teeth. Having carried the baby to a safe place, the cat rushed into the fire again. Despite burns to her eyes, severely burned ears and muzzle, she carried all her kittens out of the burning room - and, since the cat could only carry them out one at a time, she had to return to the burning garage, saturated with thick smoke, five times. The cat’s paws were already burned, her ears were damaged, her muzzle was scorched and her eyes were bubbling from the fire, but only after she pulled her last, fifth kitten out of the fire, poked her muzzle into each one to make sure that everyone was saved, did she lose consciousness. Thanks to one of the firefighters, he personally delivered the cat to the veterinary hospital, where she was rescued.

This is what Scarlett looked like in the first days after the fire

And so - later, when the fur has grown back and the wounds have healed

The New York Post wrote about the heroine cat, after which the editor received thousands of proposals from compassionate people offering to help Scarlett. The kittens were quickly taken apart (alas, one of them, the white one, died soon after the fire, but the rest settled down well in their new families), and Scarlett herself was taken in by a woman named Karen Wellen. Karen promised representatives of the Animal Welfare League, which took Scarlett into custody, that she would take care of the animal as if it were her own child, and she kept her word.

After the fire, Scarlett lived for another 13 years in the house of Karen Wellen, surrounded by care and guardianship. True, Scarlett could no longer have kittens, but thanks to her heroic act, the kitty became the standard of maternal care and devotion throughout the world. Since 1996, the Animal Welfare League has established a special Scarlett Award for Animal Heroism, which honors animals that have participated in the rescue of people or other animals (mostly dogs that take part in searching for people under the rubble after earthquakes). And Scarlett herself was recognized as the Cat of the Century.