Furry friends on Native American reservations are feeling the heat.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, animal shelters have been at capacity nationwide but especially on reservations that have underfunded infrastructure. Now climate-driven heat waves and wildfires are adding another layer of problems.
Wyoming Public Radio’s Hanna Merzbach sat down with Taylar Stagner to talk about reservation dogs. A former WPM reporter, Stagner is based in Riverton and now reports on tribal affairs for Grist, a climate-focused publication.
Editor’s Note: This story has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Hanna Merzbach: You recently wrote a story for Grist titled, “Rez dogs are feeling the heat from climate change.” Your story focuses on the San Carlos Apache Reservation down in southeast Arizona. Tell me what you were hearing from people there. What did this issue look like?
Taylar Stagner: The issue seemed, well, particularly dire, because they had just gone through this horrible fire earlier in the summer. It was called the Watch Fire. It devastated the community. It destroyed 20 homes, about 2,000 acres. And the person that I found, her name was Julie Cassadore. She’s Apache. And she was running around trying to save all these dogs.
Julie Cassadore: I’ve been rescuing for, now, 13 years, actively for like seven years.
TS: The dogs had burnt paws. And so she was like out there rescuing them and she was out there doing that until midnight or so. And they don’t have a shelter, so they had to makeshift a shelter, which is really rough to do, especially when the world’s on fire and you’re trying to find a safe place to put these animals, and also people are having a hard time finding places to be.
JC: The animals are like forgotten. So if we weren’t here as a rescue group, these people would have nobody to help them with their animals. We fundraised for the funding for the pets that were burnt.
TS: They recently got approval from their tribal council to build a shelter there, so that’s in the works right now. So they’ll be more prepared in the future for the increasing wildfires that we’re seeing here in the West.
HM: That’s great to hear. This was an incident where there was a wildfire, but with extreme heat, dogs get hot just like humans. Were you seeing these climate change impacts on reservations across the West?
TS: It’s definitely not all reservations. But there were a few and there was enough in my reporting to see that there was a problem. Reservation dogs are beloved by their community. What I heard from many caregivers is that they’re quite adaptable. They’re very spunky. They can really adapt to many different shifts in climate because they do exist in these more harsh situations than a dog that stays inside.
But a lot of these caregivers were saying that it’s getting to the point where if creeks and places are drying up, like any other animal, [dogs are] having a hard time finding resources.
HM: And of course, the fire you were mentioning down in the San Carlos Reservation also came out after the pandemic. How did this make the problem worse?
TS: We see this on the Wind River Reservation [too]. A lot of clinics were happening to spay and neuter pets. It’s a great way to curb the animal population, just spay and neuter your pets. But, during the pandemic, a lot of reservations shut down. You couldn’t come and perform these surgeries. So [after the pandemic], what happened then was, not all, but many places have had an influx.
This is not a problem specifically for reservations only. It’s a problem in a lot of places, and I think it shows up on reservations in a particular way that I find very interesting because reservation dogs end up being kind of part of the landscape. It’s a complicated situation, but, I mean, they’re almost wildlife. To manage them is kind of difficult. But shelters everywhere are experiencing just an influx in animals and they’re just having a hard time placing them. And some of them end up just roaming around and maybe without water.
HM: Will you walk me through the numbers on this? Do you have a sense of the scale of this issue throughout the region? It seemed like it was hard to get some of those numbers.
TS: It was. Not everybody would talk to me, but I called 20 shelters in different parts of the country. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals gave me some recent numbers. In shelters across the country, there’s about 6.5 million dogs and cats entering shelters, but only about 4.8 million get adopted. That gives you a countrywide scale of what’s going on. But as far as how many locally, those regional numbers are really hard. A lot of places are at capacity. Going back to Julie on the San Carlos Reservation, it was her and a group of Apache volunteers.
JC: I’m doing it because no one’s helping their animals. Not with dog food, not with cat food. Someone has to do it and no one wants to do it. So I took on the task with other volunteers.
TS: And they are still building that capacity. It’s just really difficult when you’re looking at the scale of the problem, but pretty much everywhere I called, people were very excited about this work and very dedicated to it, which was very heartening. Like, wow, this is being addressed despite lack of resources.
Hopefully, people understand how climate change is going to make the problem worse, not better. Especially with these wildfires, extreme weather, it’s going to make some of our most vulnerable people, but also animals, it’s going to make it worse for everyone.
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