An image of Hurricane Irma along with mountain dogs guarding a flock of sheep on a grassy slope. Credits – Wikimedia Commons
World Animal Protection reported that its response teams found distressed animals and warned that hungry dogs and pigs could attack livestock. It wasn’t long before that prophecy came true. Weeks became months as Barbuda struggled to recover, far more slowly than anybody had planned. Packs of canines, some of them family pets just weeks before, began preying on the very goats, sheep and poultry that had survived the hurricane itself. Farmers who returned to rebuild found that dogs, which had recently been household pets, had attacked some of their surviving livestock. Cats were also affected, hiding from wandering groups of dogs and finding it particularly difficult to source food in the aftermath. Animal welfare groups hurried to respond, setting up temporary shelters in whatever facilities were available, including one damaged hotel that residents started calling the Dog Hotel, where rescued animals were placed until a true long-term refuge was created. Volunteers drove around the island, feeding and treating whatever animals they could reach, while others worked to reunite pets with owners who had been forced to leave without them, sometimes making the difficult decision to euthanise dogs that were too far along in their transformation to be safely rehomed. What happened in Barbuda has become a kind of case study for disaster preparedness agencies around the Caribbean, exposing a hole that evacuation protocols don’t often cover: what to do with an island’s animals when its inhabitants can’t take them with them.
The dogs were responding to a landscape in which food, shelter and human control had suddenly disappeared, while the livestock were left exposed to predators in an environment very different from the one they had known before the storm.
