When the flames came dangerously close to Serena Null’s home north of Los Angeles, her cat Domino ran away despite her best efforts to catch him.
“We could see the fire from the entrance, we just didn’t have enough time, we had to leave it,” explains the upset young woman of 27, who lives in the town of Altadena, one among the most affected by the devastating fires of last week.
Returning to the scene the next day, the house had gone up in smoke and Domino was nowhere to be found. Serena Null then thought that she would never see the black and white feline with piercing green eyes again. Until Friday she burst into tears when she found him alive.
“I was so relieved and just so happy that he was here,” she said outside the headquarters of the Pasadena Humane organization where Domino was found. When he arrived, he had injuries to his paws, a burn on his nose and was very stressed, she says.
Domino was one of hundreds of pets the center took in when the Altadena fire broke out. The rapidly advancing fire forced thousands of people to flee and abandon their homes, often with only a few clothes on their backs.
The demand for Pasadena Humane has been unprecedented, even for a place accustomed to crises. “We have never had to shelter 350 animals at a time in a single day,” assures Kevin McManus, a manager of the organization.
Many evacuees, forced to spend the night in shelters or hotels, brought their animals to Pasadena Humane themselves.
– “Rarely seen animals” –
Others were found during rescue operations carried out by authorities or volunteers.
The shelter has even arranged its office spaces to accommodate all of these animals.
“It’s not just dogs or cats,” notes Kevin McManus. “We have animals that we have rarely if ever seen at the shelter.”
Like a pony, who spent the first night of the fires at Pasadena Humane.
More than ten days after the start of the fires which devastated the second largest city in the United States, the organization still shelters some 400 animals, including rabbits, lizards, turtles and even birds like a sumptuous large green macaw. , red and blue.
-Several owners, who cannot return home, visit their animals, like Winston Ekpo, who came to spend a few minutes with his three German shepherds.
This 53-year-old man and his family had to find a shelter themselves, where it was too complicated to take the dogs. “So we came here. The line was really long,” he remembers. Since then, they have come to visit their animals several times.
– “250 animals returned” –
At the doors of the shelter, tears of sadness turn into tears of joy.
In the context of fires, the organization distributes and updates a table, updated every hour, listing animals lost and saved from the flames, with photos and information concerning them.
“We have returned about 250 pets to their families,” says Kevin McManus.
One of them is Bombon. The puppy, a chihuahua mix, went missing in Altadena in November, but was found thanks to fire efforts.
One day, a friend saw the photo of the dog on Instagram, says Erick Rico who came to pick him up.
The 23-year-old young man, excited at the idea of finding Bombon, was unable to sleep the night before his visit to the shelter, in the early hours of the day.
“It’s very hard, you think about him every day, wondering if one day he will come home,” he confides. “Today I’m really happy that he’s coming home.”
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