Alison Cagle at Sierra magazine writes—What Happens to Animals During Natural Disasters?
As Hurricane Florence delivers torrential rainfall and strong winds over the Carolinas, many emergency workers are mobilizing with a single priority: saving animal lives. [...]
Monica Frenden, director of Feline Lifesaving at Austin Pets Alive, was on the ground during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, and describes the mix of sadness and relief in owners who gave up their pets before fleeing. “Wherever there’s human devastation, there’s animal devastation. If people can’t get out, animals can’t get out.”
Naturally, preemptive planning is key to managing a 24-hour emergency shelter.
Once an emergency shelter’s central command post is established, animal rescuers typically start contacting municipal and county shelters in impacted areas, offering to absorb their animals, and for an important reason: shelter staff may have no choice but to euthanize their charges, to spare them painful deaths due to the disaster at hand, or to make room for new animals coming in from the devastation. [...]
In addition to transporting animals to shelters and foster homes out of harm’s way, disaster rescue operations present an overwhelming amount of tasks: search-and-rescue missions; receiving pet surrenders; and providing emergency medical care. The former involves first responders who seek out animals abandoned by fleeing owners or strays desperate for a life-saving hand—often risking their lives to search through fires, contaminated flood waters, toxic lava smoke, and sometimes, even alligator colonies, as Austin Pets Alive did during Hurricane Harvey. […]
In the aftermath of a disaster, animals on the streets are often spooked and full of adrenaline. “Animals were tied to trees [after Harvey hit],” Frenden says. “Cats were floating on trash cans down the road. Cats, dogs, horses, chickens, pigs, you name it.” Once rescued, animals are transferred to evacuation centers and treated by volunteer veterinarians. Sickness, infection, and disease are disasters-within-disasters that can make the difference between a few lives lost, and hundreds. “We took in the biggest wave of injured or sick animals,” Frenden says, “including a cat who swam through a fire ant colony and had burns all over her body from trying to get to higher ground. We took lots of parvo pups, and kittens with ringworm. It was controlled chaos.” [...]
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“In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.”
~~Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (1992)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2016—Junior Trump either doesn’t know what a blind trust is, or has taken lessons from Senior in lying:
There’s really only one way to avoid the mass of foreign entanglements that would come from allowing Donald Trump anywhere near the White House.
If Donald Trump wins this election and his company is not immediately shut down or forever severed from the Trump family, the foreign policy of the United States of America could well be for sale.
But Trump isn’t about to let his precious company go. He continues to push the completely un-blinded trust that would put his children and executives in charge. And despite already putting in much hard work stirring up a mess over the last 24 hours, Junior Trump is out there pretending that Donald would never peek.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Wow, what a weekend! Greg Dworkin started rounding up the headlines, but it was hard to get past Kavanaugh. Just like it was in his party days! Lots going on in this story, and we hit as much of it as we could: the allegations, the pushback, the politics & more.
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