Uuuuuuummmmmm...wut?
Is "telepathy" the name of her gun?
She sounds like a loon that just happens to know how to approach animals. Her actions were somewhat appropriate (calm, squinting eyes, not oanicking), but she doesn’t understand what she was actually doing. Ai, what a weirdo!
People are getting smarter. This is weird to a stable mind today, but was common place 200 years ago.
I agree that the energy level helped calm the cat down. Animals (humans included) react based on the energy around them. Think about it - if you go into a place where everything is hectic, people are angry, there's loud indecipherable noises, you're more likely to react with anxiety or anger than you would with calmness. So while the woman is probably delusional about the telepathy (no more so than Christians who pray "in the spirit" ), remaining calm - like stoned calm - is most likely what kept her from being mauled. The cat's adrenaline was already spiked from escaping the fires, so once she calmed down, she crashed.