"How Pets Survived Hurricane Sandy" by Jesse Ellison at the Daily Beast

[applegrove]

How Pets Survived Hurricane Sandy

by Jesse Ellison at the Daily Beast

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/07/how-pets-survived-hurricane-sandy.html

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In 2006, following Hurricane Katrina, in which some quarter of a million pets died after being left behind by their owners, Congress passed the Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act, requiring that state and local disaster plans include pets in their procedures. In 2007, New York City assembled a task force to help with this planning, and the result, experts say, is the strongest implementation of the Act in the country. In the wake of a disaster like Sandy, all of New York CIty’s shelters are required to accept pets, as are city taxis and even public transportation systems.

"It’s not just feel-good legislation,” Dawson says. “If people are not encouraged to bring their pets with them, if they don’t have the comfort and security in knowing that their pets will be cared for, people will not follow evacuation orders. People will put themselves in harm’s way, and put first responders in harm’s way if they have to be rescued.”

Allison Cardona, of the ASPCA’s Field Investigations and Response team, says that some 250 pets remain in New York City shelters a full week after the storm. In regions that have been cut off from power and supplies, her team has been delivering pet food, and they hope to scale up that delivery in future days with big donations from Petsmart Charities, Iams, and Del Monte Foods. P&G Pet Care has already pledged to donate more than 88 tons of food to help the region’s affected animals.

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Though Cardona says that reuniting families with their lost pets is incredibly rare, Carmona’s story had a happy ending too. After Roxy’s disappearance, she filed a lost dog report on the website lostmypet.com, contacted Lost and Found Pets Staten Island, a Facebook group, and in no time, the photo of the tiny black puppy was cross posted, on Craigslist, and other sites devoted to reuniting missing animals with their owners in the wake of the hurricane. On Monday, Carmona got a call from a young man who’d found the little dog on Richmond Road, one of the island’s main thoroughfares, and Roxy was returned to her family.

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