Fending For Themselves

Bad enough to read about the tribulations of the people evacuated from the exclusion zone around the Fukushima nuclear plant in the wake of Japan's disastrous earthquake and tsunami.

Somehow, no matter how desperate things get, you know that people have some capacity to care for themselves. In dire straits, yet government is there and social agencies work to alleviate the stress and the burdens imposed upon people, although their anguish at their great loss makes them inconsolable with grief.

But then there is the horrible plight of the domestic animals left to fend for themselves. The trouble is they cannot fend for themselves. They have been bred and are accustomed to being cared for.

They are no longer feral, they have no memory of looking after their own needs. And most of them are kept in confined places where even if they might be able to find food and water, they are constrained from doing so. And so, they slowly, agonizingly expire.

When the residents of the exclusion zone were evacuated they were not permitted to take their family pets with them. Those dogs and cats and any other pets had to be left behind. The congestion in refugee camps, in schools and public facilities was bad enough; to include pets would have been intolerable.

For a while people were permitted to return from time to time to tend their pets and their farm animals, but then they were no longer given permission to return. The animals were to be left to die. Authorities sent workers in to destroy the animals that were in distress.

The haste with which people left at being ordered to do so, left little time to think of their pets. Many were left chained to the outdoors and many others were locked within their homes. Some people returned to look to the welfare of their pets, some did not, locked in their own abyss of despair.

Many of the animals have died, slow and lingering deaths, of neglect and starvation. The domestic dogs that could began to run in packs, anxiously looking for sustenance. Then intermittent visits by owners to look to the care of their abandoned pets were no longer permitted. The once-supervised trips have been closed down.

While some animals were removed to animal welfare sites and foster homes sought for them, the problem still remains with abandoned pets and farm animals. Horses, cattle, pigs, poultry so reliant on their owners for their existence had no one to rely on. Left in their sheds and coops, they perished.

The situation is intolerably sad and miserable.