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Every natural disaster, despite all of the attention it gets, always has a silent set of victims: animals. That’s not to say that we should devalue the lives of humans or even place those of their pets at quite the same level, but many times the media, and thus monetary relief, focuses on the effort to rescue and support the human victims and the pets get ignored.
Of course pets are not entirely on their own in these situations. Groups like the Humane Society and the ASPCA work alongside the government and local officials in this country to help evacuate animals and adopt out any made homeless by the disaster.
Other countries do the same. During the continued horrible flooding in Thailand, a special group of volunteers has gathered in its capital, Bangkok, to stay and rescue any pets left behind. BBC News spoke to one of them, public official Samran Mupangklang.
Mupangklang’s day job is to make cattle vaccines for the Ministry of Agriculture. His soft spot for animals is evident; when he heard the government was looking for volunteers to rescue animals trapped by the flooding he hopped at the opportunity.
The volunteers use a parking lot safe from the flooding as their main base. It’s become both their camp of operations and their emergency shelter. The lot is full of the brightly-colored crates used to house the hundreds of displaced cats and dogs.
When not actively out on a rescue volunteers stay at the parking lot waiting for a call and tending to the animals located there. They work based on reports received about trapped animals. Sometimes they hear from people evacuating who saw an animal along the way, or sometimes, as was the case with Tuanjai Chanpeng, a pet-owning citizen calls directly for their help.
Chanpeng is known in her neighborhood as “Maew,” which means cat. The nickname is obvious because she owns 48 of them. She didn’t want to evacuate until she knew her many felines were safe, so she called the pet rescue volunteers.
Mupangklang sets out with his crew, packing metal boats with pink and sky blue cages. They head over to Chanpeng’s residence, which is partly submerged, and begin the long process of loading all of her cats onto their boats.
Many pets are stuck for reasons like Chanpeng’s, because owners didn’t want to leave without them but couldn’t transport them alone. Others had to leave their pets behind because they were evacuating to places where they couldn’t take animals. That’s where Mupangklang comes in.
It’s not a job entirely without hazard. Mupangklang bears scratch marks from frightened cats. Other dangers are a bit more unique. “One day, we had to rescue some dogs in one of the suburbs,” Mupangklang recounts to the BBC. “All the neighbors were telling us the waters were full of crocodiles. We were not that scared, because there were a lot of us. But we didn’t really know what to do if we saw a crocodile.”
They didn’t encounter any, and Mupangklang and his team were able to successfully rescue the dogs. It’s thanks to his compassion, and that of the many other volunteers, that these and other pets will have a happy ending in the midst of this disaster.
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