1 Introduction

The 2019–2020 bushfire season in Australia was unprecedented in duration, scale, and intensity. Beginning in the hot, dry winter (June–August) of 2019 and burning up until the end of summer (February) 2020, the fires impacted every state and territory, although New South Wales was the most significantly impacted state. An estimated 24 million ha of land were burnt, killing or displacing nearly three billion animals, while 33 humans lost their lives (Binskin et al. 2020). Alongside impacts on endangered species such as the brush-tailed rock wallaby, lesser known and even unknown species may have been lost forever (Wintle et al. 2020). The Black Summer bushfires offer a sobering glimpse of our “new normal” in a climate-changing world; if carbon emissions continue to increase as projected, the climactic conditions of 2019 may be considered “average by 2040 and exceptionally cool by 2060” (Sanderson and Fisher 2020, p. 176).

Australia had no unified or adequate national emergency procedure in place for protecting animals before, during, or after the fires. In contrast to this institutional failure, human communities on the ground stepped up to fill the huge gaps in formal service provision at significant financial, personal, safety, and emotional cost to themselves. Amidst catastrophic and life-threatening conditions, people in the places most heavily impacted by the fires autonomously organized to evacuate, shelter, feed, water, and provide healthcare and emotional safety for domesticated, wild, and farmed animals. These networks and their efforts continued well after the fire fronts had passed. For many people and animals, these interventions proved invaluable, saving lives and significantly reducing isolation and trauma, and they were deeply appreciated by local communities. Although the scale of the disaster and the lack of institutional support limited the impact of the community networks that arose, they represented an important exemplar of how communities can and do spontaneously organize to address the impacts of climate disasters that the state neglects. Unfortunately, due to lack of recognition and support—and likely exacerbated by the social impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns that followed—many of these networks have lapsed since the fires ended, and there is no record of how they functioned or what they experienced. In combination with the lack of formalized systems to care for animals in disasters, this means that when another disaster occurs, people will be mostly starting from scratch again. This reality means that people are now worrying about how to care for animals in the event of future fires.

Our research project, Developing Systems and Capacities to Protect Animals in Catastrophic Fires, sought to partially fill these gaps by documenting what occurred and how communities responded. We conducted 56 in-depth, trauma-informed interviews and four community workshops in the Shoalhaven region on the New South Wales South Coast, which was one of the worst affected areas. We included care for three principal categories of animals, specifically domesticated (including companion animals and larger animals like horses), farmed, and wild animals. Our primary focus was on documenting community knowledges (the experiences, actions, and insights) of people who cared for animals, in order to evaluate what would be needed to help such communities do, and/or cope, better in a similar situation in the future. Beyond the value in documentation, the data we collected serve the further aims of developing a comprehensive picture of strengths and weaknesses, impediments and opportunities. This analysis can assist community members as they prepare for future disasters, and help key stakeholders, including governments, to provide the infrastructure, legal, policy, and economic support required to assist community-based efforts to protect animals in future catastrophic disasters.

This study had three aims: first, to report on informal community efforts to care for animals and the experiences of those involved; second, to document and analyze how these efforts interacted with formal systems of disaster management; and third, to suggest ways in which disaster policy could be improved to support and facilitate more effective community-based action and to ease the burden communities bore as they sought to protect and care for their multispecies members and relations.

2 Animals in Disasters

Animals are rarely considered within disasters studies literature (Wu, Heyland, et al. 2023). When they are, the literature overwhelmingly classifies animals in terms of their functionality to human beings, either as potential risks to human safety during disasters, or as potential assets for disaster resilience (Travers et al. 2017; Thompson et al. 2018; Wu, Bains, et al. 2023). For example, Thompson et al. (2014, p. 215) argued that some risks could be reframed as “protective factors” if human attachments to animals could be leveraged to “motivate disaster preparedness, early evacuation, and survival.” There is also a growing body of literature focused on wild animals as contributors to ecosystem health and the extent and implications of biodiversity loss in disasters, especially climate-related disasters (Thompson et al. 2018; Carlson et al. 2022; Ogunmakinde et al. 2023; Rumpff et al. 2023). In summary, when animals are considered in disaster research, they are usually objectified or instrumentalized, either as private property that humans own and that affect human experiences of disasters; or as objects who have important ecological roles to fill in service of “nature” at a high level. Neither of these approaches consider animals as “subjects,” by, for example, recognizing that animals are also experiencing disasters and that disasters impact the quality and viability of their lives.

There are, nevertheless, a few papers that work with ethical frameworks such as animal rights and recognize the intrinsic value of other animals. Work within this very small field examines human moral responsibilities toward animals, especially considering the impacts of human-made disasters like climate change on animal lives and ecologies, including the “extraordinary suffering” of animals as sentient beings who cannot mitigate climate change and may have limited abilities to adapt (Lovvorn, cited in Best (2021, p. 64); see also Fraser et al. (2021) and Vieira and Anthony (2021)). Anthony and Vieira (2022, p. 181) called for “interspecies relational solidarity” that accounts for the collective interests of humans and animals in disasters and extends an ethic of care to all community members, inclusive of animals.

Within the literature, proposals regarding how to care for and manage animals in disasters include legal and policy reform, greater awareness and inclusion of animal welfare considerations in disaster planning and management, and further research on animals in disasters (Best 2021; Kelman 2021; Trigg et al. 2021; Clancy et al. 2022). A potentially far-reaching approach suggested by Best (2021, 2022) is the extension and evolution of legal designations for different animals within property and disaster law, toward a “stewardship model” that reflects Vieira and Anthony’s (2022) relational solidarity approach. To continue to advance such proposals, there is an identified need for further context-specific research on human-animal interactions in disasters, especially research that considers animals other than companion animals (Vieira and Anthony 2021; Wu, Heyland, et al. 2023). In addition, researchers suggest that there is a need to frame and conduct disaster research in more inclusive, interdisciplinary, and less anthropocentric ways (Wu, Heyland, et al. 2023).

Regarding wild animals, other scholars have highlighted the importance of long-term monitoring, community education, training of experts, and consultation between communities and wildlife specialists (Glassey 2021; Parrott et al. 2021; Legge et al. 2022). More locally-specific recommendations made in the literature include the need for governments, including local councils, to refurbish, build, and maintain appropriate animal evacuation shelters, the dissemination of accurate information, and training for emergency personnel and social workers that accounts for the complexity of human-animal relations during disasters (Darroch and Adamson 2016; Thompson et al. 2018; Ogunmakinde et al. 2023).

Our research project contributes to these literatures in three key ways. First, we approach this project with an ethic of multispecies justice, which acknowledges that communities are always multispecies, and that all beings deserve to be treated with respect and cared for (Celermajer et al. 2020). Second, this project takes a grounded bottom-up perspective so as to develop policy recommendations that are based on rich, detailed accounts of the experiences of these communities. Critically, we examine the informal and spontaneous forms of community organizing that unfolded and position them as visionary experimentations in how disaster-responsive, climate-adaptive, multispecies institutions could function. Our recommendations thus seek to support and strengthen these community institutions, rather than ignore, pathologize, over-rule, or criminalize them. Third, while our intention was to focus on the 2019/2020 bushfires, we note that these came in the wake of numerous record-breaking summers and severe droughts, and that years of repeated catastrophic flooding followed before and while we conducted our interviews. As such, our study offers important insights into the lived experiences of multispecies communities throughout multiple, compounding climate disasters.

3 Research Methods

The Shoalhaven region refers to the lands of the Wodi Wodi, Jerrinja, Yuin, and Wandandian Aboriginal peoples (Shoalhaven City Council 2024a). Located south of Sydney, it encompasses a coastal plain where most of the region’s 109,611 people live in the regional city of Nowra, small towns, and numerous satellite settlements (Shoalhaven City Council 2024a). A large variety of habitats including ocean, lakes, wetlands, woodland, and eucalypt forests provide homes for millions of animals, among them 107 threatened species and 16 endangered ecological communities (Shoalhaven City Council 2024b). Many of these animals live in protected areas, including national and state parks and reserves that were severely impacted by the Black Summer bushfires. This includes Jerrawangala National Park, where 99% of the Key Biodiversity Area within the park was impacted by the fires (Rumpff et al. 2023). The Shoalhaven offered a strategic location for this research, given that it includes farmland, national parks, and urban and peri-urban areas, and thus encompasses a wide range of animals and animal-human relations. This means that the outcomes that this project reports on—the processes of, impediments to, and facilitators of organizing to protect animals in disasters—are likely to provide insights that will be relevant for other regions of Australia and potentially other parts of the world. However, different ecological, socioeconomic, and legislative contexts will produce different outcomes, and comparative studies would be beneficial to establish a more robust understanding of bottom-up experiences of animal care in climate disasters.

Between August 2022 and June 2023, we conducted 56 semistructured interviews with 63 stakeholders from the Shoalhaven region, as well as relevant experts further afield (some interviews were with multiple people). Our main objective was to speak to community members from the Shoalhaven who voluntarily engaged in informal efforts to care for animals so as to develop a rich picture of what happened on the ground, why, and how well that worked, and the factors that facilitated and impeded their efforts. We began interviewing leaders from relevant community-based organizations, such as local wildlife care organizations, and posted invitations to participate in relevant Facebook groups that had been active during the emergency period as well as through local networks. Following these initial interviews, we used a passive snowball method, where interviewees contacted other potential participants and let them know they could contact us if they were interested. We also interviewed government employees and experts from other regions to learn more about the formal processes that were and were not planned, and did and did not happen, during that time; about best practices that were happening elsewhere; and about legal and policy barriers to caring for animals in emergencies.

Table 1 provides an overview of the stakeholders we interviewed. We did not ask people for formal demographic data, but we note that approximately two-thirds of our community participants were women. The exception was with farmers where we spoke to more men than women, but due to recruitment challenges, we spoke to only a small number of farmers. We found two major categories of people who helped care for wildlife: first, those who had been volunteering as wildlife carers through formal organizations prior to the fires who continued with the work of rescuing, providing medical aid, food, homes, and rehabilitation during the fires; and second, those who were not previously involved in wildlife care but were so compelled to act during the fires that they organized with others in the community to try to provide food and water in the bush. Although imperfect distinctions, we named these groups as Formal/Experienced Wildlife Carers, and Informal/Spontaneous Volunteers.

Table 1 Interview participants
Full size table

Animals discussed in the interviews included, but were not limited to, horses, chickens, dogs, cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, bees, cows, peacocks, other birds, possums, wombats, kangaroos, wallabies, alpacas, and donkeys. In most cases, although people cared for animals in both categories, they were mostly focused on either caring for wild or domesticated animals.

Members of our research team conducted interviews in person at local venues in the Shoalhaven Local Government Area (LGA) chosen by the interviewees. In some instances, this was the place where they were caring for animals during the Black Summer fires, which provided additional opportunities for the interview team to collect observational data. A small number of interviews were conducted on Zoom; these interviews were mostly with interstate experts rather than the local community members. An interview question schedule was used to guide the semistructured interviews. The interviews were designed to gain information from the interviewees regarding the practical details of what happened to them and their non-human communities during and after the bushfires, what they did in response to this, what the outcomes were, and their experience of the larger institutional structure within which they were operating. The full list of the interview questions is available in our project report (Sturman et al. 2024). These interviews were audio recorded and de-identified before being transcribed by professional transcribers.

Interview transcripts were then coded with the assistance of the NVivo software to produce preliminary themes, which helped inform the development of the workshops that followed. First, two members of the research team (Anna Sturman and Freya MacDonald) immersed themselves in the interview transcripts, focusing on the experience of each interviewee. Together, they then returned to the interview guide and developed high-level themes, based on patterns of similarity as well as distinct or contradictory examples, that provided answers to the research questions. In consultation with the project’s Chief Investigators, sub-themes were developed, and the NVivo software assisted in collating interview excerpts for each preliminary theme. The coded interview data informed the development and content of the workshops that were undertaken in the second stage of the project. As part of this, we developed three vignettes, one for wildlife, one for domesticated animals, and one for farmed animals, that were composed using the interview themes. These vignettes were shared with the workshop participants before the workshops, as a means of providing our preliminary findings to them and as a basis for them to provide feedback on these findings (see Sturman et al. (2024) for the full text of the vignettes).

During May and June 2023, four 5-hour interactive workshops were held, specifically for community members who helped care for animals during the 2019–2020 fires. Again, while we did not formally collect demographic data, approximately 75% of the participants were women. Participants were split fairly equally between having cared for domesticated or wild animals, with many having cared for multiple kinds of animals. Approximately 10% were farmers. The workshops consisted of a range of interactive small group activities, including a World CaféFootnote 1 style activity, where we brainstormed responses to three key questions: What really worked for animals last time? What really didn’t work for animals last time? What needs our attention now? Data collected at these workshops included the written data that the participants contributed to the group brainstorms, notes taken by the workshop facilitators, and the researchers’ observations that helped inform our analysis of the project’s overall findings.

Working with the transcribed interview data, the written data from the workshops, and the researchers’ observations noted during interviews and workshops, we then refined the preliminary themes developed from the interview transcripts. Our full project findings are discussed in our research report (Sturman et al. 2024). In this article, we focus on key themes that help answer the following three research questions:

  1. (1)

    What did community members do during and after the fires in order to care for animals, and what was this experience like?

  2. (2)

    How did these informal community efforts interact with formal systems of disaster management?

  3. (3)

    What do these results suggest about how disaster policy and practice could be improved?

4 Findings

Our research not only confirmed the unprecedented nature of the fires, but demonstrated how the scale of the fires impacted care for animals. These fires moved incredibly fast, which prevented people across the country from being able to react with sufficient speed to protect themselves, their property, or animals. Further, for many, the fires came on top of a degraded baseline, where the conditions of life for animals and the people who cared for them had already been eroded through, among other factors, excessive land-clearing, habitat fragmentation, and road-kill, and where wildlife carers in particular had faced decades of underfunding and exhaustion. More broadly, over 30 years of neoliberal policy had undermined much of the collective infrastructure that enabled individuals to be involved in voluntary care work. In the remainder of this section, we discuss key themes regarding community experiences of caring for animals and how this interacted with formal disaster management systems.

4.1 People Were Profoundly Connected with Animals and Created Complex and Effective Community Networks to Care for Them

Participants told us that the animals they live with are as important, in some cases more important, to them than their human peers. These animals form their community and family. For example, in the midst of an evacuation, one participant recalled screaming for “her babies” that sent the Rural Fire Service (RFS) searching for human babies, which they could not locate. When the RFS found out she meant the wombat joeys, who were safely inside the loungeroom, they laughed with relief at the confusion. This moment highlights the significant differences in how formal agencies and community members can value, speak about, and act in relation to non-human animals. As Participant 26 commented:

One thing that you have to realize, is people’s animals are their children, and they are their life. If you let someone think that their animal isn’t safe, they will put themselves in danger to try and get to that animal or save that animal […] That’s one thing the firies—you know, if they’re not an animal compassionate person, they don’t get that.

Extensive community networks arose, building on existing networks of animal carers, and including many people who had never organized in this way before but were drawn to participate by the sheer scale of the devastation, and a sense of deep responsibility.

I put up a post on Facebook on our business page […] I hadn’t actually asked for help [yet]. But within a couple of hours of that post, my friends just started arriving with floatsFootnote 2 and then someone from the local transport company, she brought her truck and there were people everywhere saying, “Right, let’s get you off,” which was just incredible. So the community support was really beautiful because we had a lot of horses to move. (Participant 4)

For wild animals, people organized themselves via Facebook, WhatsApp, phone calls and text messages, and local face-to-face meetings to locate resources with which to build water and food stations and distribute water and food. Many participants reported Facebook and WhatsApp being absolutely critical resources, as they enabled people to post requests for help in real time, and for that message to be seen by a wide yet relevant audience, who could then coordinate to support those people. They self-organized into functional roles, including coordination, sourcing, building or compiling the distribution systems, transport, physical and administrative maintenance, and liaison with the various levels of state actors operating during the disaster. People offered in-kind contributions, like boxes of beer and food, as recognition of the effort and the financial expenditure others were making. Some groups organized for resources to be sent from Sydney food markets and pet supply stores, for volunteer groups elsewhere to perform labor like sewing pouches for orphaned baby animals and building animal shelters.

I mean there was so much goodwill in the community, so many people wanted to help, both in the city and in the country. So, people in the city were sending down fruit and stuff as well, there were lots of donations of all sorts of things. (Participant 11)

Once organized, local groups operated autonomously from one another. Self-monitoring of the water and food stations and decisions to remove the supplementary food and water occurred according to the rhythms set by these local embedded networks. Some groups used GPS or other mapping tools to keep track of the location of the different water and food stations, often with one person taking the initiative to coordinate groups’ information.

Despite the massive community mobilization, it is important to note that there was considerable disagreement between various community actors, often regarding what was the best thing to do given many constraints, or the challenges that arise when the provision of care might create other risks to humans and/or animals. Tensions were exacerbated by the crisis conditions of the fires, and there is a danger that simple narratives of communities coming together during disasters and being resilient gloss over the extreme trauma, burnout, and loss that people have suffered.

4.2 Formal Policies and Procedures Were Woefully Inadequate

Our desk research indicated that official government advice was limited to guidance on farmed and companion animals (that is, no advice was provided regarding caring for wild animals, and little was provided for large, domesticated animals), and that responsibility for this care was assigned to individuals rather than communities. We asked most interviewees if they had heard of the New South Wales (NSW) Animals in Disasters Management Plan (NSW Government 2024) and overwhelmingly, the response was no. Almost all participants expressed disbelief and frustration at the lack of planning for wildlife, for example:

They [governments, including local council] had weeks to prepare before this. It just was not organized well enough […] I could have got so much more done if I had the power and the resources. But—and that will be your biggest thing is getting councils and State Government to put in place policies and a team, an emergency wildlife team or animal team, to be ready to go when this happens again—and not just have all these fluffy people up the top doing all their talking, bringing in the big money and doing bloody nothing. What you want is the people on the ground who work with this all the time—you know, boots on the ground. (Participant 27)

Many participants reported that government agencies responded to the disaster in ways that were variously unhelpful, prevented them from contributing, or penalized and may have criminalized them for doing things they deemed important for their community. This included mobility and land access issues, such as evacuation orders, restrictions on who could go into which parts of the forest, and roadblocks. All of these resulted in those who felt compelled to care for animals that had otherwise been abandoned feeling forced to contravene such directives, significantly adding to their stress and the difficulty of the work. There was almost unanimous agreement that government had got in the way and failed to provide any meaningful help to animals or those caring for them. As just one example, there are bureaucratic biosecurity systems that must be followed if you want to move certain animals around Australia, such as the “pig pass”Footnote 3 that sets out detailed requirements for moving pigs. Such biosecurity systems have clear rationales and benefits, and we recognize that these may or may not be understood by those who raised objections to them. Nevertheless, we found that there was no provision for considering the need to fully enforce them in the case of emergencies, when they present serious barriers to people caring for animals, forcing them to choose between breaking the law and saving lives.

Most participants were unsure of which agencies were responsible for what, and even government employees did not consistently know which agencies or staff were responsible for which particular tasks. Such confusion meant that in many cases, crucial roles were not fulfilled. As one participant stated:

There was no structure in any of all that, it was quite chaotic, the interplay of all of those different things that were going on really. The government agencies were certainly caught on the back foot by the whole interplay of the whole thing. (Participant 14)

4.3 Inadequate Information, Knowledge, and Communications Were Major Barriers

We had our horses on a neighboring property and he locked up the horses because he was a bit scared that they might, when the RFS came, not that they did, they might get in the road of trucks and things like that. So, he locked them up into a yard and that being the reason why they died was because they couldn’t go where they needed to go to get away from the fire whereas the cattle, none of his cattle actually died because they could go to spots that weren’t being affected. So, I think if there was some sort of—further down the track if you’ve got animals or a flyer or something so people realize don’t lock up your animals, let them have a bit of freedom so that they can move to areas because they were burnt from head to toe and that sort of thing. (Participant 55)

The difficulty of getting accurate and up-to-date information about the movement of fires has been documented elsewhere (Binskin et al. 2020), but for people caring for animals there were additional information gaps. Our participants struggled with gaining access to accurate, reliable information, and this lack of information specifically relevant for animals of different types was a critical barrier. Many participants reported not knowing where they could take their animals, and that even if some options were known (such as the local showgrounds), the actual availability of these options was often changing and unclear. For example, some people told us that they arrived at the showgrounds only to be told they were full and sent onwards to the next town. Others we interviewed, who were managing the showgrounds, did not believe that people were turned away. This inconsistency is indicative of the confusion people experienced. Knowing where to go was not just about knowing what infrastructure existed, but being able to predict the course of the fires and where would be safe, and for how long. Some participants evacuated their animals, only for the fires to arrive at the place they evacuated to while sparing their home.

The informal/spontaneous volunteers who found themselves trying to care for wildlife who were still in the bush struggled to find accurate information on what would be the best things to do for those animals. This evidenced a general deficit in knowledge of native Australian wildlife biology, including what they eat, how they behave, and the ecologies they live within. These gaps in knowledge resulted in significant community conflict regarding issues such as whether supplementary food and water would be likely to attract predators, make wildlife ill, or expose them to injuries. Given the diversity of species implicated, these questions were very difficult to resolve and in the context of the catastrophic fires, caused significant stress to community members and significant disagreement among different stakeholders. As climate change continues to alter known baselines and challenge the applicability of existing evidence-based approaches, these tensions seem likely to proliferate.

There’s not any information on realistically what you do with your animals in a case of an emergency like that in a massive disaster. I mean it’s like someone said about cutting the fences. But now you’ve got stocking cattle running through the bush and they don’t know where the fire’s going to turn or what’s going to happen. They could end up anywhere, they could end up jam stuck, get themselves into crevasse of a valley and just not be able to get back out. That’s not really an answer either. (Participant 29)

While some people in the community lacked the practical skills required in an emergency, there were community members who held immensely valuable knowledge and important skill sets that were crucial to the safe animal care and evacuation. Local, place-based, interpersonal, and relational knowledges were especially important, as these knowledges are not held by formal agencies. For example, knowing how particular animals would react to certain situations, knowing which community members had which animals with what needs, which roads were inaccessible, and such kinds of knowledge were instrumental to saving many lives, human and non-human.

Despite the critical role that they played, community members reported that often their efforts, and the valid and important knowledges and skillsets they contributed were not officially recognized, and sometimes even actively dismissed by formal agencies. This led to a lack of trust, frustration, and disappointment among community members regarding the formal agencies, and hindered the capacity of formal agencies and community members to work effectively together.

4.4 Accessing Resources Was a Major Challenge

In many cases, it was difficult to find adequate transport and emergency accommodation for animals under the tight time frames of the emergency. Often the resources and infrastructure were simply lacking, or too expensive for people to access.

I mean the government provided all this money; it just took such a long time to come through. Then when it did come through, the manpower wasn’t there to be able to spend it. (Participant 17)

In part this inaccessibility was due to animal care being considered an individual responsibility, rather than a community or society wide responsibility. The individualization of responsibility was eased when community members stepped in through providing resources and skills.

Other barriers were also significant, such as evacuation centers only being opened if there was a fire happening locally. This meant that some people who followed emergency warnings to “leave early” (that is, on days of catastrophic fire danger even if no fire had started) therefore had nowhere to go with their animals. Further, when they were opened, animal evacuation centers required people to stay with their animals 24/7, which was impossible for many people who had other demands they needed to fulfill.

Resources such as medicines, or special kinds of foods, were especially difficult to access due to the fires creating supply chain issues or direct destruction of the supply. Identifying and then finding food for wildlife who were starving due to the complete decimation of the forests was very challenging, as foods that are commonly available for domesticated animals are not suitable for all species of wildlife. These sorts of foods are not usually grown or harvested in Australia at all, and even if they are, accessing them in times of emergency was nearly impossible. As such, volunteers would be trying to source appropriate foods by, for example, taking fresh branches of eucalypts from gardens and other forests, to deliver them to the burned places. Questions as to the effectiveness of these approaches arose.

There were things like knowing which hays and things you could put out that they would eat, particularly for wombats and things. There are certain hays that they won’t eat, and there’s no point in putting it out. Then you sort of had the problem of, well, the hardware store that we’re getting it from, their supplier won’t bring that sort of hay. So we had to go to a different hardware store, [and they say] “we can’t do that.” (Participant 12)

4.5 The Lack of Support Exacerbated the Difficulty of Decision Making

Given the aforementioned complexities, some—but not all—people reported that it was initially a big challenge to make the decision to evacuate domesticated animals. They reported having difficulty simultaneously thinking through multiple evacuation plans and sets of care needs while under great emotional, physical, and financial stress, which was exacerbated by the lack of clear guidance or information about animal evacuation or care. This contrasts strongly with the availability and accessibility of clear information about preparing and responding to fires in ways to protect human life and property. The difficulty of such decisions was amplified by uncertainty around whether, and if so, when to evacuate; lack of information about appropriate evacuation sites; the difficulty of finding evacuation sites capable of taking animals over extended periods; and ensuring access to feed, water, appropriate fencing/shelter, and care at the evacuation site. One of the implications of these multiple forms of uncertainty and lack of information was that it led to delays in evacuating animals.

I mean the particular concern that we dealt with a lot was temperature, transport and animal welfare. Do we sedate them? Do we have to fill them up with electrolytes beforehand, so they’ll be less likely to become dehydrated in the transport? (Participant 11)

People who did decide to stay and to keep animals with them often reported that they were able to do so because they had access to essential infrastructure that ensured a degree of fire protection. Those who reported being in this situation noted that they had sprinkler systems, water tanks, steel sheds, and concrete platforms, or that they were on properties that had been heavily cleared. Some, particularly those with pre-existing, established support networks, took up offers from friends and volunteers to temporarily foster their animals. When this occurred, a whole set of decisions around transportation and timing were streamlined, but this was often hindered when road access was no longer safe, or roads had been closed. At the extreme, some people had to decide, under stress and extreme threat, which animals to protect first, or at all. This was extremely distressing for people who did not have access to the resources they needed and had no time to make an emergency plan.

4.6 The Demands Extended Over Significant Time Periods

Evacuating animals was followed by ongoing care throughout the fire risk period, requiring similar levels of organizational planning, community networking, and mental and physical labor. In some cases, people left animals while they evacuated themselves, leaving others unsure whether and if so how to care for the animals that had been left, including whether they needed to be evacuated. People who had to evacuate different animals to different places spent weeks or months traveling every day to visit and care for the animals at these different places; or asking people who were with the animals to do this work, but then feeling indebted to them, while often being unsure if others were capable of doing so. This is in part because caring for animals during emergencies is more complex than caring for them at other times.

Because it was the end of the drought, there was no grass. So, my job over those three months was really going out to the horses in the morning across a lot of different places. Traveling to each property, topping up their water and giving them feed. And by the time I’d finished that and, you know, got kids off to school and stuff like that, then I’d go back again in the afternoon to do the same thing. So, it was hard for me to come out here and look after the wildlife because I was completely looking after the horses. (Participant 4)

During the fires, people who cared for animals suffered significant financial losses. These came in different forms. People spent money on petrol, food, medicine, transport, temporary fencing, and other necessary resources. Some had to forsake paid work so that they had the time needed to provide the care that they did or lost paid work as a result of the fires and so the impact of financial costs was greater. In addition, many items were more expensive than normal at that time, due to the emergency. For example, petrol costs increased due to roadblocks that meant that people had to drive long ways around, and the supplies such as food being shipped in also were subject to these additional petrol costs.

Even once the immediate fire risk had passed, and people might have been able to return animals home, complexities and challenges arose. Infrastructures and resources at the animals’ homes had often become very different due to the impact of the fires—whether due to loss of physical property such as sheds and fences, or to loss of vegetation and habitat, such as shade trees, pasture, or trees with blossoms or hollows. Some people’s own homes had been destroyed in the fire, meaning that they were required to live elsewhere. In addition, with the pulse of adrenaline now gone, exhaustion, stress, trauma, and burnout set in for some people.

This was exacerbated by the lack of formal recognition of the incredible efforts people had gone to, and the lack of structures, funding, or programs to assist them. Inevitably, the extreme circumstances people had been pushed into led to conflicts and tensions. For example, some people’s animals had been killed or harmed during the period. Communicating these losses and injuries, and taking responsibility for them, was a source of much grief and pain for community members who had done their best to look after various animals. Moving animals back was stressful for the animals too, for various reasons.

The scariest thing for me was—once my horses were not burnt, the scariest thing for me was how was I going to keep feeding them? We were told—when I rang up the fire helpline for animals, we were told that we were going to be allowed [just] one bale of hay per horse […] another thing that would have been helpful was to have someone give us rugs, because a lot of our stuff got trashed; like, it just got destroyed. […] because when you’ve got that much rain, what happens is that their skin, if they’ve got any mark on their skin, it creates a fungal infection and they get rain scald and then all their hair falls out. Their hair falls out, their eyes get really—above their eyes; their eyelids and their eyelashes get very sore. (Participant 21)

4.7 The Devastation and Abandonment of Animals’ Lives Left a Wake of Trauma

Given the vast numbers of animals who were injured or killed in the fires and the close relationships and attachments many human community members had with these animals, people experienced severe emotional losses. For some, this involved grieving the loss of an individual animal that they had a deeply interpersonal relationship with and for others, a more existential sense of injustice and systemic violence at the huge numbers of animals who had suffered. For many people in the region, the presence of native animals and the habitats they live in is critical to their sense of place, home, and value. Two different participants described similar situations:

The fire had gone through North Bendalong and was racing towards Manyana and people had nowhere to go. They were trying to fight the fire in thongs and t-shirts and garden hoses—rubber garden hoses. So they would go from one person’s house to the next person and they worked as a team. Through the next few days you heard stories about kangaroos jumping into the ocean on fire and firies saying that birds were just dropping from the sky, like in front of them. I’ve made friends through [one of the local organizations] and many of these people are scarred for life. Like some of them are suicidal. (Participant 42)

The people at Lake Conjola, I’ve spoken to a couple of people that were there that got evacuated to the beach and they said it was like an apocalypse. They said there was dead birds dropping out of the sky. Kangaroos would come hopping out of the bush on fire, land on the beach and see the people and turn around and hop back into the bush, and I know it really heavily affected very—most of the people that were on the beach, the horrific things that they saw. […] to be able to help the animals to recover would’ve been healing for people. (Participant 29)

All of the above culminated in community members being subjected to extreme stress, trauma, and mental health issues, as well as physical injuries. Two separate people we spoke to reported witnessing someone get kicked by a horse who had been stressed by the situation. One noted that she had therefore had to take her child to get facial reconstruction surgery while all the horse evacuations continued. Another couple suffered extreme burns from radiant heat that hit them as they sought to cool the wildlife in their care.

For many, the interviews we conducted were the first time someone had asked them about what they went through, and many found recounting the situation to be very emotional. The lack of public witnessing of their experiences, and of the value of non-human animal lives, was noted as a further hurt, indicating that the lives of animals and their efforts to protect animals were apparently not worth commemorating. Some participants noted that formal psychological services were either too hard to access, or their availability ended before the issues of trauma had had time to surface and become evident. We also note that for many people in rural communities, accessing psychological support remains stigmatized.

5 Conclusion: How Could Disaster Response Better Serve Multispecies Communities?

In light of the breadth and scale of the failures of formal disaster response systems to adequately care for and rescue animals and the people who care for them as they were impacted by the Black Summer fires, the cultural and institutional transformations required to achieve multispecies justice are vast. For the purposes of this article, we outline a few changes that our research clearly indicated are required; further recommendations are outlined in our project report (Sturman et al. 2024).

First, and at the most general level, disaster arrangements need to respond to the realities of people’s lived experiences within multispecies communities. This means that they need to recognize that communities rather than individuals are the locus of agency, attachment, care, and responsibility and that these communities include humans and non-human animals. People’s relations with animals are of utmost importance to them and the loss and suffering of animals cause immense grief and trauma to the humans that care for them.

Second, agencies empowered to and capable of providing care and rescue for animals need to be formally embedded in official disaster responses. For example, animal welfare groups, wildlife carer groups, and professional bodies such as vets need to be part of official and coordinated disaster preparation, response, and management. Moreover, such experts need to be integrated into the mainstream disaster response agencies and their expertise embedded throughout the organizations’ operations. Such emergency service agencies should be encouraged and funded to upskill and improve their capacity to integrate with community-based animal care efforts.

Third, the expertise, skills, and capacities of community networks that have demonstrated their interest in and capacity to effectively care for animals in disasters need to be recognized and supported. While the intervention of formal institutions will be necessary given the scale of the climate disasters that will occur in future, this does not mean that community-based efforts should be seen as replaceable by formal institutions. Their agility, local knowledge, and capacity to respond quickly and effectively are a tremendous resource, but they need to be supported financially, institutionally, and emotionally.

Fourth, and building on the above, funding and financial support needs to be made available for multispecies communities before, during, and after disasters. Such funding would encourage and support communities to develop emergency plans that include animals. This will require expanding the existing approaches to disaster planning beyond a focus on human life and property. Such planning needs to take place at the level of the community or sub-groups of communities before disasters occur. It also needs to include the provision of training for communities specifically on assisting animals before, during, and after disasters. When disasters occur, governments then need to fund and facilitate the provision of species-appropriate food, medical supplies, and infrastructure such as temporary fencing and additional shelter to care for animals. Such goods and services should be made available through agencies that are readily accessible to all communities.

Fifth, accessible and practical information on caring for different types of animals during disasters and on the agencies and systems that are available to support animal care and rescue need to be broadly disseminated and embedded in information networks. This needs to include people who are professionally responsible for animal care, registered wildlife organizations, people with companion animals, and informal wildlife carers. Such information should be communicated proactively in advance of disasters, targeted in geographic areas that are most likely to need this information, and in multiple languages and formats (including, for example, disability-accessible information).

Finally, within this non-exhaustive list, infrastructure established to support communities during disasters needs to account for the fact that these communities are multispecies. This includes, but is not limited to, evacuation centers. Similarly, emergency provisions established to facilitate care and rescue need to take into consideration the needs of animals. For example, regular restrictions on transporting animals or accessing private property where animals may remain ought to be reviewed in light of how they may impede the safety of animals in disasters.