Race to save animals in Texas fires
Vets, volunteers treat burn victims across vast region
CANADIAN, Texas — Horses with singed tails and bellies licked by flames. Cows whose hides are spotted with burns. A baby goat, just 2 weeks old, orphaned by the blaze.
These are the scenes that emergency veterinarians and volunteers are finding as they traverse the wideopen fields of the still burning Texas Panhandle, trying to save what animals they can and ease the suffering of many others. Their cases in recent days show the devastating effects that the state’s largest fire has wrought on a region where a person’s wealth can often be measured in herd size and acreage.
“Lots of burns,” said Dr. Laurie Shelton, a veterinarian who is part of Texas A&M’s Veterinary Emergency Team and among those who sprang into action after the Smokehouse Creek fire ignited last week. “It’s just tough. It’s a rough deal.”
The Smokehouse Creek blaze is one of several major wildfires that were still difficult to contain over the weekend; dry, windy weather led to warnings of increased fire risk across the region.
For Shelton and the other vets who have tended to the cattle and other farm animals struggling to survive the fast-moving flames, the days start early and end late. They wake up before sunrise on cots at a command center in Canadian, divide into teams, load up trucks and begin seeing patients of all sizes, shapes and colors. In recent days, they tended to a burn on a stud horse’s eye, treated 20 cattle and found a donkey that was lost in the fire whose injuries were so severe it had to be put down.
“Fire doesn’t discriminate between houses, barns or trailers,” said Shelton, 47, a longtime horse veterinarian whose day job is now as a firefighter and emergency medical technician in Dripping Springs, outside Austin. Despite the distressing caseload, many injured animals had been saved from far worse. “There is a herculean effort on the part of ranch owners to get their animals to safety.”
The Texas A&M team arrived last week with a narrow mission of aiding the search dogs that were sent with the university-sponsored search-and-rescue team to look for people injured or stranded by the fires. They bandaged the dogs’ feet with special wraps that keep them from getting burned but allow them to feel the ground for balance.
But the next day, state officials called and asked for any veterinarians still available to help treat the large numbers of struggling livestock across the region.
Dr. Deb Zoran, who leads the team, grew up on a farm in Kansas and spent a large portion of her career focused on cat and dog nutrition. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, she said, she and others at A&M began considering how veterinarians could better prepare for large-scale disasters.
Wearing dark black sunglasses against the Texas sun, Zoran moved swiftly Sunday, consulting on injured cattle one moment and checking in on the dog teams the next. During missions, she sleeps on a cot in her makeshift office, a trailer cluttered with gloves, radios, snacks and other supplies.
Elsewhere on the grounds, beyond the shower trailers, veterinarians were using a quieter moment to bathe the search-and-rescue dogs and wipe off their feet the adhesive left by the protective wraps.
Zoran’s team, which for this fire has had two dozen people deployed at any one time, has treated about 180 animals, mostly cattle, since the fire began. And ranchers and cowboys are still finding injured animals on their vast properties.
State officials have estimated that thousands of livestock were killed by the fire, which began Feb. 26 and has killed two people. Some landowners have said a downed electric pole started the fire, although state officials have not made any conclusions.
“The ranches are so big, there’s no possible way for any group anywhere to cover this entire territory,” Zoran said.
Unlike forest fires, when flames can envelop animals, the fire in Texas burned quickly across grassland, meaning many of the initial injuries were burns on the legs and bellies of cattle and horses, and sometimes on cows’ udders. Some cattle were also injured running through fences as they sought to avoid the flames.
Now, a week since the fire began, the veterinarians are seeing different kinds of wounds: damaged hooves, plus respiratory problems from inhaling large amounts of smoke.
“There was the initial fire burn — horrible things — and then there’s the short little window when, OK, they’re alive, now what?” Zoran said. “And now we’re starting that second phase.”
One major concern with hoofed animals like cattle and horses is the possibility that the part underneath the hoof gets so inflamed that the hoof comes off, which can happen a week after the fire. That makes it impossible to stand and may lead to a decision to put the animal down.
And respiratory issues can be fatal, particularly if animals are not given medicine to stave off infections.
Some residents have taken it upon themselves to offer what treatment they can and to shelter dogs and cats who are lost or whose owners’ homes were destroyed.
Marni Prater, who lives outside Fritch, Texas, has been selling T-shirts during the day to support victims of the fire; in the evenings she volunteers to treat animals for smoke inhalation and burns. She has provided albuterol, an asthma medication, to horses, cats and 400-pound pigs, and recently treated a flock of sheep whose backs and feet were singed by flames.
All of that came after she and her husband and their two young sons had to flee — taking several of their horses with them — when the flames rapidly approached the house they moved into two weeks ago.
“You could just see flames rolling down the road,” she said. They thought they would have time to get all eight horses off the property but were forced to leave several behind. Luckily, they all survived.
This weekend, Prater was dealing with an even fuller house than normal. There was a baby goat, Coco, whose mother was killed by the fire. There were several dogs. And outside, Prater was trying to help several horses breathe better, using a nebulizer connected to a mask large enough to fit over a horse’s muzzle.
As she walked toward the pasture where her horses graze, her 4-year-old son, Ryder, ran out after her with a stethoscope and bag of candy and helped guide the horses through a gate. Prater said her phone had been buzzing almost constantly with messages from people seeking help for their animals.
“It’s exhausting,” she said, still with a smile. “I’ve never had to charge my phone as much as I have the last few days.”