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When Hurricane Helene blew through Burnsville, North Carolina last month, flooding forced evacuations as the Cane River swelled to 20 feet above normal. One family watched in horror as their beloved cat, Ricardo Blanco, was swept away in the waters.
Do three emus constitute a mob? That’s how many were rescued on a busy roadway in Selden, New York a few weeks ago. The Strong Island Animal Rescue said in a Facebook post that they were alerted to a baby emu loose on Middle County Road, but when arrived on the scene they found not one but three juvenile emus, running around and “in danger of getting hit by cars.”
Animal-rescue organizations, big and small, are working overtime in the Southeast as hurricanes disrupt the lives of both humans and their pets. The damage wrought by Hurricane Helene, which tore through inland areas not usually susceptible to big-storm paths, is still being assessed while stranded animals await rescue.
Flash floods in northern Thailand forced more than 100 elephants to evacuate to higher ground, while at least two animals were swept away presumed lost. Dramatic videos and photos released by Elephant Nature Park near Chiang Mai showed panic-stricken elephants wading through flood waters as their human handlers struggled to lead them to safety.
A beaver in Massachusetts has been granted a stay – at a comfy animal shelter – by Governor Maura Healy, who intervened when a court was about to decide whether to exile the little mammal to the wild. The 2-year-old “Nibi” has been in the care of the Newhouse Wildlife Rescue in Chelmsford since it was just a few days old, when it was found alone by a roadside.
This week a pair of beluga whales were rescued from an aquarium, the NEMO Dolphinarium, in war-ravaged Kharkiv, Ukraine. Marine mammal specialists from Oceanogràfic de Valencia, Georgia Aquarium, and SeaWorld pulled off the rescue that took weeks to plan.
This week PBS aired a new documentary on heroes of Ukraine, human and animal. “Saving the Animals of Ukraine” documents wartime life and death for animals – in war-torn households, in zoos, in the wild – and the people who save them.
Torrential rains and intense floods soaked southern Brazil last week, killing over 140 people and forcing more than 100,000 to evacuate. Amid the disaster in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, hundreds of volunteers are busy rescuing animals stranded by the rising water.
Every year, Shannon Keith writes a letter to every animal-testing facility in the US, asking them to release their animals to the organization she founded in 2010, the Beagle Freedom Project (unconnected to the group in Wisconsin fighting for beagle rights). She rarely gets a response, so when she wrote to a huge testing laboratory in Nowata, Oklahoma, her appeal was ignored.
A sheep named Sugar, who had escaped from an Australian farm five years ago, was spotted living in a mob of wild kangaroos at a reservoir 20 miles from Melbourne.
Yellow police tape surrounds Victor Crowell Park in Middlesex Borough, New Jersey, as an escaped 4-foot alligator continues to evade capture. In the past week, the escapee has been spotted at least a half dozen times in Ambrose Brook, a conduit between Lake Creighton and the Raritan River.
When we last checked in on actor James Cromwell, he was super-glueing himself to a Starbucks counter to protest the inflated price of plant-based milk. This week he is attending to a new cause: a baby pig that had fallen (jumped?) off a truck on the way to the slaughterhouse.
An African serval cat tested positive for cocaine after escaping a traffic stop in Hamilton County, Ohio, and is now recuperating at the Cincinnati Zoo. The big cat bolted after its owner was pulled over by police in January; it leapt into a tree, where he was rescued by Cincinnati Animal CARE.
On February 3 a freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, necessitating the evacuation of many of the small town’s 4700 residents. Following a “controlled burn” of toxic fumes to neutralize the burning cargo that fouled local air and water, there were no reported casualties, yet.
First, the sad: The pigeon that was dyed pink for gender-reveal idiocy didn’t make it. “We are deeply sad to report that Flamingo, our sweet pink pigeon, has passed away,” tweeted New York City’s wildlife rescue Wild Bird Fund. “Despite our best efforts to reduce the fumes coming off the dye, while keeping him calm and stable, he died in the night. We believe his death was caused by inhaling the toxins.”
Birders in New York City are out in force in Central Park, braving the coldest temperatures of the winter for the chance to spot Flaco, a Eurasian eagle owl that had escaped from the Central Park Zoo. The majestic bird had been sprung from his enclosure on Thursday night, apparently by vandals with cable-cutters.
It probably sounded like a cute idea – what if we paint a pigeon pink for our gender reveal party? But when the idea was realized, the outcome was very bad for the pigeon. Adding stupidity to ignorance, the bird was released somewhere near New York city’s Madison Square Park, where a good Samaritan found the disoriented creature and brought it to the Wild Bird Fund, the city’s go-to for wildlife rescue.
Two animal-rights activists were acquitted this week of felony burglary and theft charges, five years after breaking into one of Smithfield Foods’ factory farms in Utah. After taking damning video footage of the farm’s horrendous conditions the pair departed with two piglets.
It’s that time of year when residents of Iceland’s Westman Islands gather thousands of baby puffins and heave them off a cliff. The chicks not only survive the strange annual intervention, it’s crucial to their survival.
Last week 300 homeless pets from Puerto Rico were flown to a second chance at life in New York and Maine. The Sato Project and Wings of Rescue spirited 165 dogs and 135 cats from the island's overcrowded animal shelters, with a boost from an unlikely source – Tito's Handmade Vodka.
