Ceremony honors animal casualties
For Fernando Mora and Sondra Edwards, the death of two horses in their care on the first night of the October Wine Country fires remains very raw. On that night, they were awakened by the sound of trees exploding around their Santa Rosa home. Mora tried to let the horses out of the barn, but smoke and wind-swept burning embers forced him back, leaving the horses to the unrelenting flames.
“It crushed me. It was total devastation,” said Mora. They were housing the two young Andalusian males, who had arrived only the previous day, for a friend. “It was as bad as having to turn around and leave a human behind.”
Unlike human casualties, which stand at 44 from the wildfires, there’s no official count for animal deaths in such disasters, including pets, farm animals and wildlife. That’s one of the rea-
sons that animal welfare groups organized a recent memorial for the fires’ “forgotten” victims, a ceremony that included poems, prayers, spirit stones and a talk from uniformed Cal Fire personnel.
“To have the ceremony acknowledging animals just felt like huge validation for me,” said Dixie Keith, who cried while describing her last day with Giorgio, her horse of 27 years. The white Arabian died at a Santa Rosa boarding facility near Mark West Springs Road in an area hit hard by the Tubbs Fire.
The Sonoma County Farm Bureau did not receive reports of large-scale loss of livestock, but the number of animals displaced, injured or endangered by the disaster was vast, said Monica Argenti, community engagement manager of Sonoma County Animal Services.
The Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa, just one of several regional evacuation centers, housed 600 large animals at one point during the fires. During the first month of the emergency, the county’s shelter took in 360 stray animals compared with 196 during the same period in 2016.
Given the circumstances, the shelter kept stray animals longer than usual before making them available for adoption, Argenti said. In some cases, injured animals have not yet been returned to their owners, while others are in foster care while people rebuild their homes.
“We know there are still people looking for their animals,” said Argenti.
That kind of uncertainty and loss was one of the reasons for the recent memorial in Napa, said organizer Monica Stevens, who called it a large therapy session — a way “to come together, grieve, and then give it up and move on.”
“People are having a hard time moving on,” added Stevens, co-founder of Jameson Animal Rescue Ranch in St. Helena, which helped move farm animals in evacuation zones during the fires.
All but 45 of the 200 chickens at Leisen’s Bridgeway Farms perished when the farm, which has been in the Leisen family since 1870, burned. It’s on the same private road as Mora and Edwards’ property, where only one of 28 houses survived.
“One of the roosters I lost was one of the first I raised from a chick,” said Janet Leisen. It was part of her breeding stock of heritage Delaware chickens that were all lost in the fire. She and her husband were on vacation when the fire happened, but a neighbor saved many of the chickens, even opening the door of one coop that was on fire. But the barn housing 80 of them was already fully engulfed.
“It was pretty devastating to see the ones that were up in the barn,” she said. “It was clear that they were trying to escape.”
Even more upsetting was when some of the surviving birds didn’t make it because they no longer had shelter at night, making them vulnerable to raccoons. Since the bridge to their private road burned down, it was difficult to get to the farm, but she was finally able to persuade the rest of the flock to roost in one of the remaining coops. She installed an automatic door so she could close them in remotely at night.
There were some other bright spots. Their barn cat, Kitty, showed up 12 days after the fire; she was starving and her paws were burned to the bone. After they took her to an animal shelter, she was transferred to UC Davis and given free veterinary care for more than a month. (A friend offered to care for the cat while the Leisens rebuild.)
Meanwhile, a neighbor’s peacock, who lost his mate in the fire, has been keeping the hens company during the day.
“The roosters are tolerating him,” said Leisen.
Her neighbor, Edwards, is still haunted by having to call her husband back when he was trying to let the horses loose.
“It was a horrible, horrible decision,” said Edwards. “But I felt like we were in immediate danger.”
In fact, they were the last on their street to cross the burning bridge to safety.
“Frankly, the only thing we have shed tears about through all of this was the agony that we imagined the horses went through,” she said. “Not the loss of our home.”