In Texas’ largest fire, a race to save animals large and small

Horses with scorched tails and bellies licked by the flames. Cows whose hides are stained with burns. A baby goat, only two weeks old, orphaned by the fire.

These are the scenes emergency veterinarians and volunteers encounter as they traverse the wide-open fields of the Texas Panhandle, trying to save as many animals as possible and ease the suffering of many others. Their cases in recent days highlight the devastating effects the state’s largest-ever fire — which is still burning — has wrought in a region where one’s wealth can often be measured by herd size and acreage.

“A lot of burns,” said Dr. Laurie Shelton, a veterinarian on Texas A&M’s Veterinary Emergency Team who was among those who responded after the Smokehouse Creek fire broke out last week. “It’s just tough. It’s a tough deal.”

The Smokehouse Creek fire is one of several large wildfires burning in the Texas Panhandle that remained difficult to contain over the weekend as dry, windy weather led to warnings of increased fire risk across the region.

Much of the town of Sanford, population 132, was urged to evacuate Sunday evening as yet another blaze burned about 300 acres and threatened homes before it was brought under control.

For Dr. Shelton and the other veterinarians who cared for the cattle and other farm animals struggling to survive the fast-moving flames start their days early and end them late. They wake up before dawn on cots in a command center in Canadian, Texas, divide into teams, load trucks and start seeing patients of all sizes, shapes and colors. In recent days they treated a burn to a stud dog’s eye, treated a herd of 20 cattle and found a donkey that had been lost in the fire and was found with injuries so severe that he had to be put down.

“Fire doesn’t discriminate between houses, barns or trailers,” says Dr. Shelton, 47, a longtime equine veterinarian whose day job is now as a firefighter and emergency medical technician in Dripping Springs, outside Austin. Despite the harrowing workload, she said, many injured animals had been saved from much worse: “There has been a tremendous effort on the part of ranch owners to get their animals to safety.”

The Texas A&M team arrived last week for the first time with a limited mission: to assist the search dogs sent with the university-sponsored search and rescue team to search for people injured or stranded by the fires. They bandaged the dogs’ feet with special wraps that kept them from getting burned but still allowed them to feel the ground for balance. But the next day, state officials called and asked if any veterinarians were still available to help treat the region’s large numbers of struggling livestock.

Dr. Deb Zoran, who leads the team, grew up on a farm in Kansas and spent much of her career in cat and dog food. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, she said, she and others at A&M began thinking about how veterinarians could better prepare for large-scale disasters.

Wearing dark black sunglasses against the Texas sun, Dr. Zoran moved quickly on Sunday. One moment he was consulting the injured cattle and the next moment he was checking the sniffer dog teams. During missions, she sleeps on a cot in her makeshift office, a trailer full of gloves, radios, snacks and other necessities.

Elsewhere on the site, outside the shower trailers, vets used a quieter moment to wash the search and rescue dogs and wipe off the glue from their feet that the protective wrappings had left behind.

The team of Dr. Zoran, which has deployed about 20 people at a time to this fire, has treated about 180 animals, mostly cattle, since the fire started last week. And ranchers and cowboys still find injured animals on their vast properties.

State officials estimate thousands of animals died in the fire, which started Monday and also killed two people. Some landowners have said a downed electrical pole caused the fire, although government officials have not yet drawn any conclusions.

“There has been so much destruction and the ranches are so large that there is no way for any group to cover this entire area,” said Dr. Zoran.

Unlike wildfires, where flames can envelop animals, the Texas fire raged quickly across grassland, meaning many of the initial injuries were burns to the legs and bellies of cattle and horses, and sometimes to the udders of cows. Some cattle were also injured as they ran through fences trying to avoid the flames.

Now, a week after the start of the fire, veterinarians are seeing different types of wounds: breathing problems due to inhaling large amounts of smoke and damaged hooves.

“There was the initial burn – horrible things – and then there’s the short window where, OK, they’re alive, what now?” said Doctor Zoran. “And now we are starting that second phase.”

A major problem in ungulates such as cattle and horses is the possibility of the part under the hoof becoming so inflamed that the hoof comes off completely, which can happen a week after the burn. That makes it impossible to remain standing and can lead to a decision to put the animal to sleep.

And respiratory problems can be fatal, especially if animals are not given medication to prevent infections.

Some residents have taken it upon themselves to provide possible treatment and take in dogs and cats that have become lost or whose owners’ homes have been destroyed.

Marni Prater, who lives outside Fritch, Texas, sells T-shirts during the day to support fire victims and volunteers to treat animals for smoke inhalation and burns in the evenings. She has provided albuterol, an asthma drug, to 1,000-pound horses, cats and pigs, and recently treated a flock of sheep whose backs and feet were scorched by flames.

It all happened after she, her husband and their two sons, one aged four and one aged five months, had to flee – taking some of their horses with them – as the flames quickly approached the house they had just moved into two weeks ago . .

“You could just see the flames rolling down the road,” she said. They thought they would have time to get all eight horses off the property, but were forced to leave some behind. Luckily they all survived.

This weekend, Mrs. Prater had to deal with an even fuller house than usual. There was a baby goat, Coco, whose mother died in the fire. There were several dogs. And outside, Ms. Prater tried to help several horses breathe better, using a nebulizer connected to a mask large enough to fit over a horse’s snout.

As she walked to the pasture where her horses graze, her four-year-old son Ryder ran after her with a stethoscope and a bag of candy and helped lead the horses through a fence. Ms. Prater said her phone was buzzing almost constantly with messages from people seeking help for their animals.

“It’s tiring,” she said, still smiling. “I have never had to charge my phone as often as I have in recent days.”

Another volunteer, Loretta Tebeest, who founded a rescue shelter in Amarillo, drove into Fritch last week to help after a fire ripped through the area. She fed dogs, cats, chickens and turkeys and found three stray dogs, which she kept safe until she could return them to their owners; one is still with them.

“We put our things aside and jumped to help them because they needed help,” Ms Tebeest said. “It hit closer to home. We felt like we had to help.”

Lucinda Holt reporting contributed.