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“No government persons have gone to the villages to inquire about them or their animals,” Solanki added on August 9, two weeks after the crisis began, confirming earlier reports from Wildlife SOS cofounder Kartick Satyanarayan.

“Satara and Raigad districts, eight hours from Mumbai, were badly inundated, with government help negligible,” Satya-narayan said. “The tragedy was partly an act of God‚ but mainly of human making. We are working in a 93-kilometre stretch of suffering villages. Two days notice was given to these remote rural areas before the Koyna Dam was opened. In an already flooded area, where was anyone to find high ground not already occupied?

“We teamed up with a local Animal Protection Club based near Karad,” Satya-narayn continued, “all self-funded, big-hearted guys at first suspicious of our intentions but later more at ease, in a Tower of Babel, with Assamese and Tamil-speaking vets, Marathi and Gujarati-speaking volunteers, and we speak English and Hindi.”

The Wildlife SOS and Animal Protection Club mostly fed and vaccinated cattle and dogs, and did impromptu humane education. “We are striving to get the people not to kick the surviving dogs,” Satyanarayan explained, “and trying to prevent a rabies fright. Every scared dog is being declared rabid. Even the members of the Animal Protection Club are not really clear about rabies.

“It is a pity that the situation is being reported as ‘Mumbai’ floods,” Satyanarayan finished, “whereas in reality the surrounding areas were worse affected.”

Government veterinarians were mobilized, but had all the work they could handle in some of the larger towns. Animal Help founder Rahul Sehgal told ANIMAL PEOPLE that his relief team distributed medical supplies to government vets who had more than 75,000 animals in care.

As after the tsunami, ANIMAL PEOPLE helped to fund the Wildlife SOS response. The World Society for the Protection of Animals funded the Animal Help Foundation effort. WSPA also funded the Bombay SPCA to do animal relief work within Mumbai, where more than 15,000 sheep and goats and 1,500 water buffalo drowned in stockyards but dogs and cats reportedly fared surprising well.

Confirmed Blue Cross of India chair Chinny Krishna in an August 12 e-mail to ANIMAL PEOPLE, “Bombay SPCA executive committee member Bakul Khatau told me she has no doubt that many kittens and puppies must have perished. However, she told me that in the area where she looks after many street dogs, there were no casualties, and that all the dogs and cats she was caring for seemed to have survived.

“A friend of hers who lives in Kalina Colony, a residential area which was flooded very badly, with water entering second floor flats, told Bakul that all the adult cats and dogs she took care of took refuge in the upper floors of the buildings and seemed to have survived.

“When I expressed some surprise at this, she said, ‘People won’t let the animals drown by not letting them in, will they?’ Hats off to the compassionate people of Mumbai!”

An August 26 International Fund for Animal Welfare press release claimed that IFAW had assisted after the flooding in Mumbai, other parts of Maharashtra state, and Gujarat, but illustrated the material with a photo showing a rhino being bottle-fed following flooding in Assam state, more than 1,000 miles away, in 2004. Other sources supported the IFAW claims only in that the Wildlife Trust of India’s Wildlife Rehabilitators Exchange Network web site acknowledged receiving some IFAW funding and described rescuing “one olive ridley turtle and a hawksbill turtle” near Surat.

Anticipating an ongoing need to do disaster response, Animal Help founder Rahul Sehgal amid the chaos incorporated a subsidiary called Animal Help in Emergency & Disaster. AHEAD appears to be the first organization in India created specifically to do animal disaster relief.

Floods continue in Romania

Flooding continued in Romania, meanwhile, for the sixth consecutive month. Amid disrupted communications, CNN reported on August 25, 2005 that “between 13 and 31 people have died in the past two days,” but further coverage was pre-empted by deadly flashfloods in Germany, Switzerland, Bulgaria, and Austria.

Outside the spotlight, Romanian animal rescue organizations struggled on. “As yet, fortunately, there has not been more flooding in Timis county,” e-mailed Adriana Tudor of Ecovet Timisoara, “but our work in the areas flooded in May and June is far from over.”

The villages of Ionel and Otelec remained in standing water, Tudor wrote. “Surviving animals are still in temporary shelters,” Tudor added, and feeding them was still difficult.

“Every week it is another region devastated,” added Fundatia Daisy Hope founder Aura Maratas. While flooding had not hit Bucharest, Maratas noted that with news media mostly preoccupied by high water, conditions at the hellish Bucharest dog pound at Chiana appear to be worse than ever. Save The Dogs founder Sara Turetta videotaped a June 29 visit to Chiana that shocked viewers abroad but drew little response locally.

Anthrax outbreaks associated with high water near the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve prompted reports that the Romanian government might massacre as many as 7,500 horses and cattle said to be roaming the region as result of broken fences. “Almost half the domestic animals in the area live in the wild. They are not registered, nor vaccinated, nor do they receive any veterinary treatment,” Food & Veterinary Safety Authority spokesperson Alina Monea told news media.

Effects foreseen

Scientists studying global warming have warned for more than 25 years that the warning signs would include increasingly severe storms, like the unusually harsh 2005 Indian monsoons, and Hurricane Katrina, which hit coastal Louisiana and Mississippi and caused evacuation of New Orleans as the September 2005 edition of ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press.

Also forecast was a loss of snow cover from mountain ranges, including the Carpathians and the Alps––and this contributed to the flood damage in Europe.

With evidence mounting that the predictions were correct, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, of San Francisco, on August 26, 2005 authorized Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the California cities of Oakland, Santa Monica, and Arcata, and Boulder, Colorado, to sue the federally controlled Overseas Private Investment Corporation and Export/Import Bank of the U.S. for funding projects that contribute to global warming.

Greenpeace, the Center for Biolog-ical Diversity, and the Natural Resources Defense Council in February 2005 asked the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to list polar bears as a threatened species, due to loss of habitat caused by global warming.

Senators John McCain (R-Arizona) and Hillary Clinton (D-New York), both rumored presidential contenders, agreed at an August 18 press conference in Anchorage, Alaska, that the George W. Bush administration has erred in delaying a firm response to global warming. McCain and Clinton had just viewed melting permafrost and receding glaciers in northern Alaska and the Yukon.

 “How much damage will be done before we start taking action?” asked McCain.

Added Clinton, “The science is overwhelming.”

Warned Royal Society for the Protection of Birds conservation director Mark Avery earlier on August 18, in London, “Migratory birds’ future is linked to concerted global actions to tackle climate change.”

Avery and colleagues wrote in The State of U.K. Birds 2004 that the British population of wintering ducks, geese, swans and wading birds had dropped to its lowest level in 10 years, and that seven out of the nine most common wading bird species had moved from the ever-warmer west coast to the colder east coast, after several abnormally mild winters.