Animal Vulnerability To Flooding
COP27: At Cairo, scientists and lawmakers just announced ominous issues awaiting around the corner for us, such as the frightening warning that beyond the 1.5 Centigrade threshold lie tipping points dangerous to our survival, such as climate-health hazards bringing about new pathogens; the forced migration shortly of 1.6 billion climate refugees from vulnerability hotspots clustered around regions at risk, as well as the insufficient results from the investments the private sector has made towards reducing global warming.
In short, expecting current farm animal business models to keep up with the new climate normal may not be possible, thus the only solution is investing in mitigating measures now.
?Floods Are A Symptom: Nevertheless, this paper is to focus on floods as one of the early symptoms of Climate Change, and as they can cause sudden catastrophic damages to the farm animal sector, it is up to the private sector to reverse the direction they are heading and the business model they are following, to mitigate the impact of flooding, a trend the Secretary General of the UN just called “a highway to climate hell.”
The Private Sector: Having spent over three decades lobbying and advocating the public sector to then seeing it move at a snail's pace, the private sector targeted in this paper are the veterinary pharmaceutical, the pet & the farm animal food industry, the food and the farm animal sectors, namely the source of most animal protein foods in the world. The hope is that by having so much money at stake they may have the interest and the resources; be more nimble and resolute in the face of what’s coming.
?Climate Change & Water Cycles: People and animals everywhere are already experiencing nasty weather extremes on several continents, with flash floods and insidious droughts at both ends of the spectrum. The appalling job national governments did during the recent period they had to try to reduce emissions to halt the rise in 1.5 centigrade in global temperatures, will sentence Humanity to suffer these extreme conditions more often than it was ever experienced before.
Livelihoods, Food Security: In most rural societies around the globe, farms and working animals are an important business component for the livelihoods of many. Farm animal byproducts such as milk eggs, meat, etc. are also important for the food security of many societies now and in the foreseeable future. Until the ideal scenario where the entire humanity moves to a plant-based protein diet become a reality, both business and food security need to be protected from the impact of floods.
Population: But this is not likely to happen overnight. Food demand keeps on growing as the global population is on track to exceed the 9.6 billion mark by 2050. Last year, however, nearly a billion people suffered from hunger, and all of that while climate change continues to affect farm animal productivity due to the effect of climate shocks and higher temperatures on their physiology, and on crops, due to higher temperatures and CO2 levels, damaging to the all-important humus.
The Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations -FAO- estimates that 1.3 billion folks depend on their farm animals and that 1.6 billion people have already been affected by floods in the last two decades. To put the impact of disasters on farm animals into percentages, 36% of disaster losses are absorbed by the farm animal sector.
Misinformation: The first misconception that impacts animal health is that animals caught in floods do not need clean drinking water as a priority. Virtually all flood waters are contaminated and a guaranteed source of disease and pain for flood victims. The second misconception is that all floods behave the same way. This article will discuss flash and slow floods below.
1.?- FLASH FLOODING: These may be one of the deadliest hazards any living being may face, as they come as fast as they go, bring the force of a concentrated tsunami and an earthquake with them, and live a distinct path of destruction path behind them.
The hydrodynamics of moving bodies of water are often underestimated, as they bear unimaginable power able to obliterate vital infrastructures such as roads, farms, bridges and pastures. Moving bodies of water can also cause generalized trauma or just kill big numbers of animals on their path. Animal evacuation in this case is nearly impossible or very risky, as these floods allow owners no time to react, let alone farm animals trapped in cages, corralled or tethered.
Companion Animals: The impact of flash floods on companion animals is largely unknown or in the form of fragmented information at best, mainly because of the ghosting of animals syndrome in most civil defence plans and protocols, but it is worth noticing that while tethered dogs may not be able to escape a flash flood, loose or free-roaming dogs on the streets can easily get caught by currents and rammed into sewers and sinkholes. Significant insights on the impact and plight of companion animals were obtained during the widespread flooding in New Orleans, and more will probably surface with recent floodings in Western Europe.
Rescue Work: Expert rescue teams undergo extensive and continuous training on self-rescue and use specialized rescue equipment to attempt to rescue people, but their mantra is their safety comes first. In the case of rescuing farm animals, reaction time, the sheer numbers of them kept in cages at intensive farms, their size, and weight, plus the logistical challenges farm animals face vis a vis the elevated humane safety risks, are simply too much and too many to give animals in a farm a fighting chance to survive a flash flood.
?Rescue efforts for these animals are in most instances attempted right after impact, once water currents lose power, levels start to recede and ways of access improve.
?Mexico, 2007: During the heavy urban flash floodings in Tabasco, one of our rescue teams looking for surviving companion animals on a boat exited a street into an avenue bearing a strong current that rammed and pinned the boat against a nearby electricity post until it turned it over, with the crew, the equipment (comms, rescue & catching, crates) and the pet food they were carrying. Needless to say, every piece of the rescue equipment was lost in the current.
The lesson learned here was the careful monitoring of water currents and their direction; weight distribution in the boat; the securing of equipment, and the safe positioning & securing of any rescued animals that may be brought onboard.
Early Bird…: But despite the alarming and sometimes even mortal danger to farm animals, the impact of most floods on them can be avoided. Once the history of flooding in an area has been reviewed and researched, the best and probably the only chance animals may have to survive a flash flood sits with early warning systems adapted to those animals. These can be simple yet effective techniques adopted by animal owners and the community itself to be ready.
In these instances, an early warning may start to take shape with local folks marking tree trunks upstream and near the river bank, to monitor river levels, to give farmers downstream time to herd or move their animals away from danger and to higher grounds.?
But the concept of early warning systems should not stop there, they should also be available at the national level for new climate-health hazards such as ecosystem changes and new pathogens, as in the case of malaria-carrying mosquitos, recently climbing to and appearing for the first time at the Bolivian highlands (5000 meters a.s.l.), on the back of a seemingly modest and innocent-looking raise in ambient temperatures.
The Philippines, 2013: In the wake of typhoon Haiyan hitting this large country and the subsequent flash floods, my team adapted community risk maps developed by the Red Cross to the needs of farm animals, plus a simple communication system based on well-known SMS phone texting, widely used in rural areas in The Philippines, for rural communities or ‘barangays’ to benefit from early warnings and allow them to move their buffalo, cattle, pigs, and goats up the hills before the flash floods arrived.
The risk maps, plans, and field simulations organized with this community ran like a Swiss clock and were a true thing of beauty, with animals orderly herded up and down the hills, in preparation for the currents to arrive!
Colombia, 2021: During the COVID-19 pandemic, a large federation of pig producers commissioned a large online simulation with complex scenarios of flash flooding adorned with plenty of audiovisual and technology effects, to simulate as close to reality as possible conditions at affected pig farms, located at a relative distance from urban centres.
The exercise aimed at fostering coordination with local governments and civil defence and developing capacity, low-cost solutions, and strategic partners to mitigate the impact on the farms. The event involved nearly a hundred actors and the ex-post analysis of pre-set indicators deemed it a success.
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The key goal with different types of livestock is always the avoidance of the surprise factor and the creation of the capacity to prepare or to evacuate in an orderly fashion for both handlers and animals, as flash floods do give early signs and warnings before they arrive.
Costa Rica, 2012: My own country often falls prey to flash floods during the rainy season, caused by heavy rain, poor urban planning, predominant hilly terrains, and lack of a solid culture of preparedness. Emergency evacuation ramps were developed for agriculture authorities, to be able to move significant numbers of livestock from harm’s way.
In the case of urban pets, the baseline welfare of pets (including immunization schemes, living conditions, and body weight) is always a strong indicator of the odds the animal may have to survive the flood. TV ads were designed and broadcasted, centred on a cute talking dachshund dog named “Trueno” (Thunder), that boasted about his family's emergency plan and the evacuation drills they periodically did together.?TV ratings, perceptions, and adoption of preparedness measures results were better than any other communication tools tried by local authorities in the past!?We learned that this culture or preparedness needs a sustained effort to perdure.
2.- SLOW-MOVING FLOODS: These are the most common floods and they bring the largest volumes of water, difficult to drain.
Pakistan, 2022: Right now, a third of the country is currently covered by stagnant flood waters, an area larger than the UK, and the forecast is that they will stay there for months, threatening millions of people with malaria, digestive, and respiratory infections and leptospirosis. The most vulnerable, however, are the tens of millions of livestock and farm animals these affected people own. Slow-moving floods cover pastures with mud, sediment, and debris, thus exposing these animals to various soilborne pathogens, starting with foot rot and respiratory infections.
Hypothermia will first induce weight loss and soon kill them, starting with calves, the weak, the old, or abortions on pregnant cows. These animals must first be vaccinated for clostridial diseases, including tetanus. Pastures underwater, wet pet food, and bales of hay also become poisonous when wet.
In the case of urban floods, God knows what flood waters may bring, often contaminated with sewage and industrial residual waters. Soon, the combo of rats plus stagnant, contaminated waters is a true recipe for disaster that will bring about dangerous Leptospirosis outbreaks.
?At the end of the day, outbreaks may eventually hit other livestock and farms not directly affected by the flood.
Argentina, 2000: A recurrent, cyclical flood of the nearby Paraná river in the province of Santa Fe inundated the rich, public lands, pastures, and river banks, periodically drowning tens of thousands of head of valuable Hereford cattle owned and kept there by small cattlemen. These cattlemen didn’t have enough barges to evacuate the animals from the river islands, nor they disposed of alternative higher-ground pastures to move their animals, and for the last twenty years, this repetitive type of disaster created an unbelievable toll of two million animals drowned.
When we first arrived in Santa Fe during the Parana floods, most cattle isolated in small lots of land left by the oversized river started suffering from pneumonia and hoof rot, followed by weight loss and certain death, a terrible, cruel end that had become a common occurrence. The saying that disasters pray on the poor was true here too; big cattle owners kept their animals safely stored at their ranches on higher grounds, most available pastures had been dedicated to soy plantations, while meat packing plants used the event to profit on small cattlemen by offering meagre prices for their thin animals.
The initial risk mapping process was not an easy deed, as stakeholders had never worked together before, but this eventually evolved into mitigation plans to identify and avoid the point of no return by quickly selling young calves, and vulnerable and pregnant animals ahead of the waters. Local stakeholders also joined forces to secure transportation barges and quickly move animals by exploring barter solutions of trading animals for alternative pastures.?
Initial results were better than expected as the next flooding time small producers reported zero animals lost in the waters!
?Bolivia, 2015: In this country, the lowlands of the Beni department in the NE periodically flood large pasture areas, endangering over 45% of the country’s livestock production. To mitigate the impact of floods on livestock, the FAO and the local livestock sector successfully built mounds or land nearly the size of a football field, elevated 5 feet over the flood levels and surrounded by a channel that serves as a water reservoir during the summer, to allow livestock to stay dry and avoid hypothermia during the flooding season. Interestingly enough, these structures and clever solutions come from pre-Hispanic times!
IN SUMMARY: By increasing the intensity and the frequency of events on a steady basis, Climate Change is already bringing about more and more violent and widespread flooding events, but the exposure, the likelihood of the farm animal sector getting hit, together with the intensity of the impact and the resulting damages will depend on human will and determination to reduce it.
Current financial and structural approaches by the private sector will no longer be able to handle the new normal, nor will it be able to assure business continuity or support increasing population numbers of both humans and animals, which are in turn, increasingly exposed to the force of floods.
NEW SOLUTIONS: Research is coming up on animals in floods on a continuous basis.
Efforts are also underway to adapt, develop and validate new approaches for business and urban planning, more often than not in the form of capacity building, awareness, and preparedness that may reach large numbers and types of stakeholders, rather than 'preaching to the choir'
These new learning solutions will make use of communication technologies (as in the case of social networks & data streaming) and new learning approaches (as in the case of drills, intuitive learning & the visualization of future scenarios), as well as use old traditions (as in the case of the Bolivian example), to avoid the initial chocking syndrome floods create, and to create awareness and capacity on both specific stakeholder groups and significant numbers of the public.
?The Ask: Is to invite the private sector to lead the way to business continuity now, before it is too late and survival will be a question mark.
The One Tip:?US President Dwight D. Eisenhower is believed to have said: ‘plans are useless, but playing is essential.' If the reader is to remember only one piece of advice after reading this article, that is 'A plan, any plan is better than no plan’ ...I said that.