Japanese Return To Radiation Area to Feed the Cats
In this rapidly changing landscape of earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis and volcanoes It is easy to move on to the next crisis and forget the last one. It can indeed be overwhelming to think of all of them as on-going struggles. The following article highlights this with a quick insight about one small area of one such crisis. Many Japanese still cannot return home because they lived so close to the damaged nuclear power plant. The following article highlights a few personal experiences of some folks who have been given a few hours this past weekend to visit their homes in the irradiated area for a few hours.
In each of these events, the toll on our animal population is also profound. Recently, I ran across the story of one kind japanese person who is putting on a radiation suit and heading back into an irradiated areas of Japan to bring food to the cats that, of course, did not make it out of the area.
According to an article in the Japan Times Online, "Teijiro Yoshida, who lived in the Kotakisawa district, said he wasn't very worried about what to bring back. He was more concerned about what he could leave." It seems that Yoshida is bringing a dozen cans of cat food into the area after being forced to leave his cat behind when the disaster struck. At the time of the evacuation, residents of the area were allowed to file requests with civil defense to have their animals evacuated, but they were not allowed to take them away with them. City officials report that the radiation level in the area is about 1.3 microsieverts per hour.
