After the first bombing of the Russian war in Ukraine, the 52-year-old pet rescuer Doug Thron joined his team to locate pets orphaned from attacks. He used an infrared drone to locate the animals using body heat. Later, in a burned apartment building, he discovered: a mother cat and four kittens.
“The first day we got there, we looked for animals and went up to an eight-story building that had been bombed by the Russians,” Thron said. The building is scarred with a huge crater from the bomb right in the middle of it. “I’m pretty sure it killed everyone in there,” he said.
However, among the ruins, on the eighth floor, they discovered a cat that appeared to have just given birth. Thron and his fellow rescuers tried to capture her, but she escaped under some device in the kitchen.
“We set up a direct trap to catch her, caught her, and noticed there was a tiny kitten sitting on top of the trap.” They try to catch the kitten, and it also runs away under some cabinets. Thron cannot trap the kitten, as it is too light to activate it. But by evening, he had caught it. At that point, the group set up cameras to see if more kittens were lurking around.
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“Sure, we saw three other kittens playing in the ashes,” said Thron.
The team was able to catch them by setting a trap with food inside. They open the cup with a rope tied to the cup, and when the kittens go looking for food, they pull the rope and trap them. At the end of the rescue mission, they have their mother and all four kittens.
Everything around is black. The 2,000 to 3,000 degree fire killed every living thing except the cats, because they hid in the cupboard.
“The mother cat survived on the eighth floor,” said Thron. “You can see pigeons all around. She survived in the apartment for a month with kittens feeding pigeons. We guess they’re hiding under the kitchen cabinets. She was nursing them down there when the bomb went off. Everything around was pitch black and the fire from 2,000 to 3,000 degrees killed every living thing except the cats, because they were being raised there.”
After the surprise rescue, Thron used his infrared drone to save more dogs and cats from buildings around Ukraine.
The man behind the drone
You may already know Thron’s name. He’s an aerial cinematographer and star of animal activism Doug comes to the rescuea program on Curious line Follow him on his journeys around the world, rescuing wild and tamed animals after natural disasters with his infrared drone. There is now a second season of the show, which brings Thron, who lives in Australia, Florida and California, to the Dominican Republic to rescue the puppies, Malawi to track down the hyenas, California to rescue the cats and animals abandoned animals after a wildfire, and Kentucky to find pets lost in tornadoes.
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Thron is the co-founder of Confirm, a drone animal rescue company, and the show follows the Assert team as they work. But he got off to a good start at rescuing animals before the show.
Since I was a child, I have raised orphaned marsupials, squirrels, and raccoons.
“Since I was a kid, I have raised orphaned marsupials, squirrels and raccoons,” he said. “But in my 20s and 30s, I’m doing more environmental work, like protecting wild places through my movies. And then in my 40s, I got involved in animal rescue.”
Thron taught himself how to fly a drone through trial and error – losing about $1,500 per error, since that’s the price of cheap drones he learned about. He was working as a drone videographer for National Geographic and Discovery when he thought of installing an infrared camera on a drone to locate animals. objects get lost more easily.
“I was filming a natural disaster,” said Thron. “There are these animals that are missing and people have gone out looking for them. I think I can find them by drone, because when you’re in the air, it’s easier to see them. But with infrared cameras, due to body temperature, they easily turn on.”
Thron’s first infrared drone rescue was in 2019 in the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian. That’s his full-time business now, even though the show only airs 1% to 2% of his rescue missions.
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Help your pet get back to normal
For the dogs and cats he saves, Thron does what he can to bring the pets back to a loving home and embrace.
Thron said: ‘We try to reunite the animals with their owners, but unfortunately a lot of people have passed away, or they may no longer have owners. “We try to find the owners, and if they’re around, we’ll reunite them. If they don’t, the animals will be adopted. Wild animals [we rescue] recovered and released back into the wild. “
As with other rescues, Thron was trying to find the owner of the cat family he found in his eighth-floor apartment. He posted to a neighborhood Facebook group a photo, and a relative of the owner. recognized the furry family. Sadly, the entire family that owned the cats – a husband, wife and child – died in the bombing. Relatives can’t adopt the cats, so Thron is in the process of adopting two of them as his own pets.
Thron is currently planning a third season of the show. He hopes it will be a vehicle for his Ukraine rescues, which have all been filmed so far.
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