A Cat Could Have Been Named Lassie

There’s Lassie the dog, and now there’s Schnautzie the cat.

Trudy and Greg guy were sound asleep; after all it was the middle of the night. Schnautzie jumped on top of Trudy’s chest until she woke up. When Trudy looked at her cat she saw that Trudy was sniffing the air as if to say, “Mom, I smell something.”

Trudy got up and took a walk around the house. “It was bothering me,” Trudy said. “I knew something wasn’t right,” She heard a “roaring” sound
in the bathroom, and discovered that the gas pipe outside the
bathroom had broken about three inches above the shutoff valve —
causing gas to be pumped unregulated into the basement.

“I
went into the bathroom and opened the window and the gas was just
fuming,” Trudy said. “Our house was saturated in a short time.”

To
make matters worse, it was unseasonably cold that night, meaning the
furnace could kick on at any time, causing a spark that could
potentially ignite the fumes.

Responding firefighters told Trudy how dangerous the
gas levels were. While this event happened back in 2007, it was only this past week (April 10, 2010) at at the Great Falls (Montana) Animal Foundation Fur Ball benefit that Schnautzie was award the famed Purple Paw award for valor.