Oprah Winfrey said she wasn’t at home when wildfires crept as near as two miles away from her sprawling 45-acre Montecito, Calif., estate over the weekend.

But had she been there, Winfrey said her first concern would have been to get her dogs to safety.

“I don’t have kids, so the most important thing for me is my dogs,” Winfrey told her studio audience. “And so we already had a plan for getting the dogs out and going to the Four Seasons in Westlake because they take dogs. So that would have been the first thing I would have done, look for my dogs.”

Winfrey said her next concern would have been to safely remove the ashes of her deceased Cocker Spaniel Sophie, who died earlier this year at age 13.

“From now on I’ll have so much more empathy and compassion for people who are going through it,” Winfrey said.

Winfrey also interviewed actor Rob Lowe, who was forced to flee his Montecito home Thursday night. “We just left with the kids,” said Lowe, whose house survived the blaze. “We just got everybody out. This thing came on so fast, you just can’t believe it.”