Are you ready to evacuate your livestock without horsing around?

Animal Welfare Officer Isabel Merritt with Lane County Animal Services (LCAS) joins Tiffany and Devon to talk about evacuating livestock during an emergency and how LCAS supports large animal owners by setting up a large animal shelter or taking care of animals left behind during an emergency. 

Episode resources:

• The Humane Society of the United States livestock preparedness guide
• Greenhill Humane Society
• Lane County Animals in Disaster (LCAID) resources
• Ready.gov large animal tips (scroll to bottom of page)
• Contact Lane County Animal Services with questions or to become a volunteer: lcas@lanecountyor.gov 

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A transcript is available online. 

**If you would like to have a question answered on the upcoming Q&A episode, please send your question to publicinformation@lanecountyor.gov or call 541-682-4526 to leave a recorded message for us to use on the podcast.**

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You can find more information, including episodes and show notes, at LaneCountyOR.gov/fan. Sign up to receive emergency alerts at LaneAlerts.org.

The views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of Lane County Government.

Transcript

The transcript is AI generated and lightly edited for glaring errors. Please excuse minor errors.

Introduction:

Welcome to When It Hits the Fan, Lane County's favorite podcast for all things emergency preparedness. Whether you're just dipping your toes into the world of emergency preparedness or you've been building bunkers since Y2K, we've got something for you. Hosted by Lane County Emergency Management, this podcast is all about equipping you with the knowledge and resources to be prepared and stay safe, no matter what hits the fan.

Devon

Before we start this episode, I want to make a quick apology for the extra background noise. Our guest, Isabel, works mostly in the field and didn't have access to a totally quiet space on the day we recorded. We appreciate that she took the time to talk with us and hope that you, like Tiffany and me, feel the value of the information she shared outweighs the inconvenience of the extra noise. Thank you. 

Hi, Tiffany. How are you doing? 

Tiffany

Great. Devon, how are you today?

Devon

I am doing well and excited to be here. I heard a rumor that there might be some exciting announcements in emergency management. What's up? 

Tiffany

Well, it's November, so people should be getting ready for winter readiness. I guess that's the, you know, lead with the preparedness in disaster. But, we have some big grant opportunities that have landed in Lane County this fall, and it's really exciting. We got a grant from the EPA to develop six resilience hubs. We got a grant from the Oregon Department of Energy to develop a fuel resilience plan for the county. And we're getting started on community wildfire planning, so that's exciting for us. What are we doing here? Who do or who are we talking to today? 

Devon

So we are lucky enough to have convinced our animal welfare officer, Isabel Merritt, to join us. She is one of two animal welfare officers with Lane County Animal Services, and she has a lot of experience over the last few years helping people with large animal evacuation. So wanted to talk about that today. 

Tiffany

Hi, Isabel. Welcome. How's it going? 

Isabel

Great. 

Tiffany

Great to have you here. 

Isabel

Thank you. 

Devon

So, Isabel, I know that you had sort of a traumatic start here at Lane County.

Isabel

A little bit. It was definitely a sink or swim moment, but I learned a lot. And here we are. 

Devon

I believe the first time we met was in 2022, during the Cedar Creek Fire. And you had been on the job for less than a week. And you were called and told to set up a large animal evacuation area. And then I called a couple hours later and said, hey, I'm bringing a bunch of reporters through and you're going to talk to them. 

Isabel

Yup. That is about how my time with the County started. Overall, we were pretty successful and we definitely learned a lot that year. 

Tiffany

Wow. Isabel. So we talk on this show a lot about, with our partners and amongst ourselves, about what we do on what we call a blue sky day versus when there's a disaster. Will you start just by talking a little bit about what you do when we don't have an emergency underway?

Isabel

Yeah. For sure. So when we aren't under an emergency, we're not operating a shelter, doing shelter in place, evacuating or any of that kind of stuff, myself and our other officer are responsible for ensuring the welfare and safety of our community and our community animals. We handle all dog licensing, not us strictly, our wonderful staff here who stay here in the office handle all of our dog licensing and take our calls, answer any questions, dispatch, make sure we have the information we need to go out and on to calls. So we definitely we cover quite a lot when we're not in emergencies.

Tiffany

It sounds like you have probably a lot of stakeholder relationships. What are those and which ones carry into the disaster environment?

Isabel

Our, probably our most prominent disaster relationship in the county is honestly with our citizens and with local ranchers, local animal owners, horse owners, people like that. When we are operating in an emergency, we are actually mostly volunteer based. So there will be our core four person team and then one part time person and then we have a list of volunteers that we call. They come out; they help us get the shelter set up. They help us care for the animals. Also, the Lane County Sheriff's Office and the Mounted Sheriff's Posse also help us quite a bit. But we honestly, we wouldn't be able to do what we do for animals without our volunteers. 

Tiffany

That's terrific. Hey, you mentioned supporting in place and sheltering. We've talked about sheltering in place with people, but you, you changed that up a little. So would you talk a little bit about sheltering animals versus supporting in place? 

Isabel

So sheltering in place or sheltering versus supporting in place. So sheltering is when an animal is brought actually down to our physical shelter location. Staff and volunteers onsite care for the animal around the clock. There's always someone there keeping an eye on them. We ensure that they have vet care and, essentially, it's almost like boarding your animal while you're out of town or something. You know, you're having someone else take care of them while you handle everything. 

If we're doing a shelter in place, mostly that's for animals that are either too many animals, like a, you know, a hundred head of cattle or something. It's not really something that's able to be supported in a shelter environment. Or maybe a horse that can't trailer or just an animal that wasn't able to be caught and removed. Anything like that would be a shelter in place situation. So we would go up, we would provide water and feed per the care instructions. We asked the owners kind of what needs to be done, what the animal's daily routines are, and we try and match that to the best of our ability.

It's not always doable due to the amount of animals that are in the county, but we do the best we can. We make sure that there is water and food available, shelter, and then if the animal needs medical treatment, we can either have a vet go after we've done that in the past, or we catch and crawl the animal and bring it down to the shelter to receive medical care.

We don't just do livestock, we do shelter in place for dogs and cats if they're not removable, like if you have feral cats or scared dogs that won't come out from under the porch or anything like that. 

Tiffany

And to clarify, for myself and people listening, we're talking about a scenario, for example, where an area has been evacuated and people aren't allowed there, but their animals remain. Is that correct? 

Isabel

Yes. So that would be like a Level 3 evacuation zone. We do shelter in place for Level 2 evacuations depending on what the situation is. And then our shelter opens to people to bring their animals at a Level 2. 

Devon

In past episodes, we've talked about human go-bags – things that you should have on hand if you need to evacuate. What would you recommend if someone wanted to put together a similar thing for their large animals? Are there some common items people should have on-hand? 

Isabel

Yeah for sure. So, if your animal’s on a specific type of feed we always recommend trying to bring like a couple gallons of, like, baggies of that feed. Because you don't know if you'll be able to get that immediately when you get them to a shelter or wherever they're staying.

A bale of hay or two if you have time to throw it in. A water bucket. Any medications. It can be really good to have, just, like a little folder with their vaccine records. You're going to have people who don't know your animal taking care of your animal. If you can give them as much information as possible, then you can ensure that your animal is getting the best care possible.

Tiffany

Terrific. Hey, for the large animal owners listening: If you just had 2 or 3 tips to give large animal owners to prepare for evacuation and, and emergencies, what would they be? 

Isabel

My first step would be to have a transport plan in place. Like have, if you can't haul your animals, have a friend. If you don't have a trailer or something, you know, make that plan before we're even in fire season.

If you're on a street where there is, you know, someone has, like an eight-horse trailer, but they only have two horses, but they can swing up the road and you can bring your horse in the driveway and put them in the trailer, you know, make those connections like that, make that plan. We do transport animals for the owners who aren't able to transport, but that demand is pretty high.

So that would be my first tip is to kind of have a transportation plan. My second tip would be to handle your animals daily. Sometimes it's hard with livestock animals. You know, people get, you know, you got cows out in the field. You don't go out there and work with them every day. You just put out their feed, check on them, make sure they're okay and leave them alone.

Even your chickens you go out there, like, they expect you to give them their food, water, all that. But if you get your animals really used to being handled, really used to being, you know, moved around in an area, it can really help during an emergency when you have five, ten minutes to get everybody loaded up and out.

Tiffany

Great. Probably also with the stress of the animals, I can imagine particularly livestock or, you know, animals that aren't domestic and used to being quote unquote part of your family. What tips do you have for reducing stress on animals during an event? 

Isabel

A lot of it goes back to the handling them regularly, making it a regular occurrence to be moved around in a trailer, even if it's just, you know, they go in a trailer, they get an apple, they come out of a trailer or anything like that. The other tip is to act like it's normal, you know, like for example, a horse. Sometimes you put them in the trailer, you take them for a trail ride, you bring them back. Your breathing's normal when you're doing that. Everything's good, you’re normal. It's not an emergency. So if you try and have that façade like, okay, this is normal, we're just going in the trailer, everything's okay. Because if you're panicking and oh my gosh, we gotta get out here. We gotta go, go, go kind of deal. It's going to, you know, what could take five minutes is going to take two hours. So you know, try and stay calm even if it's it's definitely difficult. I've had to evacuate my animals before and it's extremely hard to keep that calm, you know, move slow attitude when you just want to get everybody out of there.

Some animals, especially if there's a wildfire near you and you might be going into a, like an evacuation zone soon, but not quite yet but it's, you know, a chance, you can talk to your vet about getting like, a calming supplement for goats, horses, anything like that. Even chickens. I think they have, like, some stress-ease stuff.

So you can always talk to your vet about having calming supplements on hand so that if you are in that stressful situation, you can, under your vet's direction, of course, give your animals just a little bit of something to help them stay calm. 

Devon

For people that don't get to see it, what is set up look like when you get the call that says, hey, we need you to set up a large animal shelter, typically at the Lane Events Center?

Isabel

Well, after the office wide panic attack, we go hook up….

Devon

We all have those. It's fine. 

Isabel

So we start with going out and we hook up both of our emergency. So we have a livestock, like a horse trailer essentially, it's called a stock trailer. And then we have our other livestock trailer. But one is full of all of the paperwork, supplies, feed buckets, containers, cages, everything we need to get the shelter started.

I think we have enough in there to successfully shelter 50 to 75 animals, depending on size, breed type, species, and then we hook up to both of those. We pull them down to Lane Events Center, we get some table set up, we get some stalls set up, we call Lane Forest Products or whoever is available. They bring in some shavings.

We get some stalls bedded, then we get water buckets set up and we call our volunteers. Normally we have some on standby, kind of a short list of people who said, yep, I'm available at any time to go and we call them. We have them come in. They then, help us get started. We set up our intake, make sure we have enough copies of our paperwork, and then wait for trailers to start rolling in or for people to start calling us for help.

Devon

How do you keep track of the animals that come in, right? Because – and maybe this is just me – but a chicken is a chicken. They all look the same to me. And you know I can't tell the difference between sheep and some goats. So how do you track of all that? Because you can have hundreds of animals at one time.

Isabel

We use what's called livestock tags or auction tags. They're also known as hip tags. But it's just a little piece of paper with a number on it. And you put a little dab of glue on the back and you put it on the animal normally on the tail or on the shoulder. And then that number is assigned to that animal.

Chickens and ducks normally come in flocks, so each flock gets a number, and then that number goes on their pen. And then the animal owner will come in and they'll get a bracelet. And the animal tag numbers will be written on the bracelet. So if they bring in three goats and 20 chickens, they'll have four animal numbers on their bracelet.

Devon

Do the animal owners have access to their animals when they're in the shelter? 

Isabel

So all animal owners are allowed to come in and care for their own animals if they want. We normally run quiet time from about 8 p.m. to about 6 a.m., unless there's active emergency and active intakes coming. That way the animals have a set time where, you know, things are calm. We have security, and then normally we have myself and the other officer and maybe a volunteer or two on site.

Then about 6 to 7 in the morning, animal owners are welcome to come back. 

Devon

And I would imagine it's really helpful for the animals and their owners if they're able to come and be part of their care, right? It's got to be stressful for everyone and then not to not have access to an animal that you likely care for and interact with daily would be hard for a lot of people. 

Isabel

Absolutely. We try and relieve that stress as much as possible. 

Devon

That's wonderful. How do people generally get access to the shelter or to the sheltering in place options? 

Isabel

So we are, there's a couple different ways. Normally, right now, if we're doing that, we have a phone number that people can call. We posted it on our website and then our wonderful public information officer, Devon, posts it on the news for us. And people can call in with their information. Our office staff take that information, let us know what the situation is, what we have coming into the shelter or what we need to care for. We're building an online reporting system so that people can just put in their information online, and we can just be receiving those reports constantly as needed.

Tiffany

How about where can people go to get more information about planning and preparation? Do you have 

any favorite resources? 

Isabel

So, the United Humane Society or the Humane Society of the United States. They have some really good information. Greenhill has some really good links on their page. It doesn't. it's mostly for smaller animals, but, you know, you just take out the word dog and put it on goat, pig or chicken, cow, whatever your animal is. A lot of it is the exact same kind of preparation. Just you're looking at a different scale, like, you know, a bag a dog food vs a 50 pound bag of grain kind of deal. Then I think on Lane County Animal Services, we have a list of resources as well. You just go to the Lane County Animal Services website and then under Disaster Resources, we should have something. 

Tiffany

Perfect. Thank you so much. We started this with Devon talking about your fourth day of work. I feel like Lane County just does that to the emergency workers, right? Throw them into something in the first five days. Anything recent? Tell us about any memorable, recent responses that that you can share?

Isabel

It's not super recent. It's a couple months old, but this year I did go out with the Oregon State Police and our Oregon State vet, Ryan, and we got an alligator out of a house, and we took him to a little rescue. And, that was definitely pretty memorable. It's not every day you get to handle that.

Devon

You're brave. 

Isabel

I didn't do a whole lot of it, but it was very, very fun. 

Tiffany

How big was it? 

Isabel

He was about. I think he measured out at, like, six, 6.5 ft. He's a fairly large pet gator. 

Devon

No, thank you. 

Isabel

He was all scaly, and he had a little pool and stuff. He was fairly calm. We picked him up and we put him in a bin. And we took him to a gator rescue and that was that. 

Tiffany

I don't know what to say. There probably aren't a lot of gator rescues in Oregon. 

Isabel

So, there's two. 

Tiffany 

Wow. 

Isabel

Fun fact, Lane County has one of the highest populations of pet gators in Oregon. It's Lane County and then Klamath Falls. Those are the two places with the most pet alligators in Oregon. I didn't know that. I learned that recently. 

Devon

I'm not sure I wanted to know that. 

Tiffany

That might be the most interesting thing we've had on the show so far. 

Isabel

It's an interesting fact. I didn't know how many gators were in Lane County, but apparently it's something that the state police do every year or two, they're removing alligators. So it's a fun fact. 

Devon

Now, it's not a legal pet to have, right? 

Isabel

No, no, it is not legal to have a gator. 

Devon

Yeah. I want to give Tiffany a chance to wrap up, but I will say that over the you know what three now fire seasons. I've had a chance to work with both you and our other animal welfare officer, Stacy. It's pretty incredible to see the system that you two have built, right? We didn't used to do this every summer in Lane County. And so there weren't great systems for, you know, moving large animals, caring for them, sheltering, helping people shelter them in place. And you guys have just built an incredible program. And I think one of my favorite things is that every year you look for ways to make it better.

I've never heard you say something is final. It's always, well, we're still working on this when in reality you now have a very solid system, but you're still always improving it, I think, just the amount of care that goes into it, both from all of you on the staff and then your volunteers, is just incredible. The shelter's always a very busy place and with a lot of people there to help.

Tiffany

Thank you very much, Isabel. Thank you so much for joining us today. I learned so much, and I think anyone listening has. The last question I have for you has to do with anybody listening who might be interested in volunteering, whether their time, their resources. I know in my old county, we had a plan that had a list of people who were willing to house animals. Who would they contact for information about that?

Isabel

So, they could just send an email to LCAS@lanecountyor.gov. Just our main Lane County Animal Services email. They can just send any information or any questions they have, and then we will give them any information they need. 

Tiffany

Wonderful. Thanks again for being with us. What else do we have Devon? Are we wrapped up for the day? 

Devon

We are. I would remind folks that we are still planning to do a Q&A episode soon, so if there's something that we didn't get a chance to ask Isabel about or something you want more detail on, please send those questions in to us, and instructions on how to do that will be in the show notes, along with links to all the resources that have been mentioned today. 

Closing:

When It Hits The Fan is brought to you by Lane County Emergency Management and co-hosted by Lane County Emergency Manager Tiffany Brown and Public Information Officer Devon Ashbridge. Music is by the Love Gems. Many thanks to our listeners and guests. We are so glad you're here to help us create a more prepared community. You can find more information, including episodes and show notes, at LaneCountyOR.gov/fan. 

Sign up to receive emergency alerts at LaneAlerts.org. The views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of Lane County government.

Devon

All right, Isabel, on a scale of 1 to 10, how painful was it? 

Isabel

Twelve. Horrific. I need to go home, actually. I’m just joking. It was good. It was good.