To Protect Your Valuable Pets from the Nankai Trough Earthquake Experts explain the difference between “evacuation with pets” and “evacuation with pets

On New Year’s Day last year, Japan was hit by a major natural disaster, the Noto Peninsula earthquake. And it is still taking a long time to recover from the disaster.

Whenever large-scale disasters have occurred, there has been a lot of talk about the problems of evacuation involving pets and pets wandering away from their owners.

In particular, the Great East Japan Earthquake caused a nuclear disaster, and there were many wandering pets left behind in the evacuation zone. In response, the Ministry of the Environment has created guidelines, and in recent years, “evacuation with pets” has come to be recommended.

How do you protect your beloved pets?

In the “Disaster Preparedness for People and Pets” guidelines prepared by the Ministry of the Environment, the terms “evacuation with pets” and “evacuation with pets” are repeatedly used.

What is the difference?

Mr. Kiyotaka Suzuki, a pet disaster risk management supervisor at the All Japan Animal Specialist Education Association, explained, “‘Evacuation with pets’ means evacuating with pets.

The term “evacuation with pets” refers to the act of going to an evacuation shelter with a pet, while “evacuation with pets” refers to the act of keeping pets in an evacuation shelter with the disaster victim. Evacuation with pets” refers to the act of going to an evacuation shelter with a pet. However, it is said that too few pet owners understand the difference between the two, and less than 20% of pet owners do.

He continues.

What you should not make the mistake of misunderstanding is that ‘evacuation with pets’ does not mean that owners can keep their pets indoors in the same room.

Although pets can be kept in evacuation shelters that have “evacuated with their owners,” more than 90% of evacuation shelters in Japan require pets to be kept in gauges outdoors and people indoors, such as in gymnasiums, and pets and people must spend time in separate rooms.

Taking the Noto Peninsula earthquake as an example, there were 839 evacuation centers where people could evacuate with their pets, but only 25 of them allowed pets to be kept indoors. This figure was as low as 3%.

In Hokuriku in January, when the weather remained bitterly cold, pet owners found it extremely difficult to keep their pets outdoors.

In 2011, Kurume City in Fukuoka Prefecture established a “special evacuation shelter” where people could evacuate with their pets in the same room, but there are so few examples of such shelters in Japan that this became news. Since pets are a personal choice, it takes a great deal of understanding to create a system using public funds. And there are a certain number of people who don’t like or have a hard time with pets. It is also true that these people do not like the fact that only pet owners are given preferential treatment.