Above all, evacuation instructions are based on one thing: that people come first and everything else may wait. That rationale is sound when a Category 5 hurricane is about to hit a small island. But the evacuation created an immediate problem that disaster plans often struggle to address: what happens to animals left behind? Hundreds of pets and thousands of farm animals were left with nowhere to go and no one to feed them. And exactly that happened on the Caribbean island of Barbuda in September 2017 when Hurricane Irma forced Barbuda’s residents to evacuate the island, leaving pets and livestock behind.
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