Colorado Animal Rescue trainer Tracy Yajko volunteers in Missouri
This article first appeared in the Glenwood Springs Post Independent on July 4, 2011. By John Colson
When a tornado hits and levels a good part of a town, help comes running from all over for the people whose lives have, at best, been turned upside down.
At the same time, a different kind of help is mobilized for those four-legged dependents who live with people but have absolutely no way of fending for themselves or finding their way back home — if there’s a home to return to.
A duo of local animal caretakers flew to Joplin, Mo., earlier this month to help with the gargantuan task of caring for hundreds of animals left homeless, injured or worse by the May 22 tornado that leveled much of the town.
But as much as it helps the critters, said Tracey Yajko, one of the duo, “It’s helping the people. Sometimes, all they have left are these animals.”
Aimee Chappelle of Rifle and Yajko, of Glenwood Springs, helped the Joplin Humane Society and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals deal with as many as 1,270 dogs and cats with nowhere to go.
They were each paid by their respective employers for the time they spent in Missouri.
Chappelle, who was in Joplin from June 16 to 26, is the animal control officer for the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office. She has assisted in disaster relief efforts before, according to Yajko. Chappelle left for vacation when she returned to Colorado and was unavailable to comment for this article.
Yajko, who was in Joplin from June 16 to 21, works as the canine training and behavior manager for Colorado Animal Rescue at the Colorado Mountain College Spring Valley Campus. This was her first time to volunteer for disaster recovery.
According to Yajko, 89 animal welfare agencies from around the United States and Canada sent volunteers. They worked in rotating shifts of 90 to 110 people staffing three vacant warehouses commandeered as emergency animal shelters and administrative facilities.
“It was controlled chaos,” Yajko recalled.
Their plane tickets were paid for by the ASPCA, and they stayed in small trailers with other volunteers in an arrangement that included two meals a day — lunch and dinner.
They worked long hours in the dog shelter, she said, keeping the animals cleaned, fed and exercised. The volunteers would start early in the morning and work until about noon, cleaning up the area, feeding the dogs and taking them out for walks.
After a lunch break, they would then do it all over again until the evening, and then return, exhausted, to their own temporary shelters.
“You kind of had to turn the blinders on and do what had to get done and not get emotionally involved,” Yajko said. “You had to just keep going … that hurt. That was hard.”
The dogs are being kept in wire crates, sometimes so cramped for space that “the dog could, kind of, turn around, but they couldn’t stand up, necessarily.”
The work and the stress, Yajko said, were grueling.
“Just physically, I would say seven days was max,” she said, noting that some volunteers could not handle it for even that long.
“I have not worked that hard in a long time,” she noted with finality. “You’re lifting, bending, constantly being dragged around by dogs, and it’s hot. It was 98 degrees one day.”
Plus, she said, “there was no caffeine on site. It was very, very difficult.”
She honed in on one dog in particular, she said — a lab-shepherd mix that she thought was 12 years old and in fair shape for an abandoned pet.
During breaks between the chores, she said, “I could go in and sit with him and love on him.”
The volunteers understood the harsh realities of living through a disaster, which can drive the thoughts of their pets’ welfare from the minds of some Joplin residents.
“After what happened, that might not be the first of their worries, their pet,” she said.
They had all sorts of dogs to deal with, she continued, in varying states of mind.
“Some were scared, some under-socialized,” Yajko noted, adding that there were “a lot of little, fluffy lap dogs.”
But, in addition to the hard work and emotional stress, Yajko said, there were moments of sheer joy.
For example, one day a woman dressed in a hospital gown, with a large and clumsy brace on her arm, came in looking for her little pet, Sadie.
When the two were reunited, Yajko said, it made all the sweat and work worth it.
“That’s why we were there,” she explained. “We weren’t allowed to take pictures in there, but if we could have, that one image would have said it all.”
Another emotional high, she said, came when she was back in Glenwood Springs and watched an “adopt-a-thon” in which all but 200 of the pets still in the emergency shelters were adopted out.
Yajko was watching as her canine chum, the lab-shepherd, was taken to a new home.
Overall, Yajko said, more than 5,700 people from 20 states adopted pets left homeless by the tornado.
She said she has undergone “an adjustment” in coming home, “sort of a post-disaster feeling,” but she feels the experience has changed her and prepared her for future, similar efforts.
“I would definitely do it again,” she said. “And now that I’ve been deployed once, it would be easier to go again.”