Disasters including hurricanes, floods, and wildfires displace and kill millions of animals annually — emergency management systems increasingly recognize the need to include animal welfare in disaster planning.
Disaster response and animal welfare are deeply intertwined in ways that emergency management has historically underappreciated. The failure to include animals in evacuation planning does not just harm animals — it costs human lives when people refuse to evacuate because they cannot take their companion animals. Post-Katrina reforms recognized this reality and changed US federal policy accordingly. But implementation remains uneven, and livestock emergency management continues to lag behind companion animal planning. Animals in disasters — lost, injured, stranded — experience acute suffering that coordinated response can reduce. Building animal welfare into all-hazards emergency planning is both ethically sound and practically beneficial for human emergency compliance.