Episode 270 - Prepping For Pets According to the Texas Coop Power Magazine

This monthly publication that I receive as a member of a Texas electrical cooperative has some great prepping info!

Texas Coop Power

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good morning, Emma. Today is September the third, so it
would be the third day of the UH National Month
of Preparedness. And so we're gonna talk today about we've
talked about this well, we've talked about this publication before.
We've and I think we've probably talked about this subject before,

(00:21):
but we'll bring them together. So for folks who may
be new and I think that's uh, I think there
are I think there are some of those. That's the
thing about doing something on spreaker or Spotify or whatever.
This is not YouTube, so I don't have any idea
whose I know folks are listening and I can tell

(00:44):
where you are, I mean like general direction of course, uh. Country,
maybe t maybe city, maybe not. Sometimes it's just as other. Uh.
And when I tend to have people from the same
location multiple time, then that makes me think that maybe
it might be the same person. Anyway, the let me

(01:11):
start over, Okay, So one of the first episodes I
did was I think I called it We Have the Power,
and it was talking about electricity and how important it is,
especially for those of us who live in the country.
I guess it's important for people who live in the
city too, but it came to this country obviously later

(01:34):
than it came to the city. People who lived in
town had electricity much earlier than people who lived in
the country. And one of Roosevelt's new deals in the
thirties was the Rural Electrification Administration, And the whole purpose
of this was to get electricity to the rural areas.

(02:00):
And you know, a much bigger percentage of the population
at that point lived in the in the rural areas
than obviously does now. So that was a big deal
and it fundamentally changed people's lives. It made things much
much easier to do it. You know, it allowed for

(02:20):
refrigeration of food. You could at that point at least
run a fan in the summertime when it was hot.
You could have running water in your house, which was,
you know, for people back then, a miracle. So it
was it was a big deal to get electricity. And

(02:43):
I think in my area, my particular electrification activity happened
in maybe thirty seven. There were men in the county
from various communities, not communities, not being towns, unities just
being a little unincorporated areas might have a country school

(03:06):
might have well for sure, it would have a church
might have a store, you know, wouldn't have a post
office or a name. I mean have a name, but
wouldn't have it, wouldn't have a post office, so it
was not an unofficial town. So they got together and
formed a committee and got electricity to the country in

(03:28):
this area. Now that was, you know, about twenty years
before I came along. So I did not experience life
without electricity except when my would go visit my grandparents,
who now they might have had electricity. They have running
water because you had to go out to the to

(03:49):
the well, and they did not have indoor plumbing, but
they might have had like a light bulb in the
ceiling movie anyway, So the way that happened is that
areas formed what they call cooperatives, and the cooperative would
then petition the are e a to for a loan

(04:13):
or whatever they did to get the lines laid and
get elect electricity started, and they would tie into whatever
was the closest electrical system, like if there was a
town or whatever. And to this day, the electrical co
op still buy They don't generate their own electricity to
my knowledge, I know ours does not. H they buy

(04:36):
it from other electricity providers. So it you know, a
lot of times in this area it may be swept
Co or something like that. AEP Now there's different Encore. Uh,
they're different electric companies to buy it from, and so
my co op does that. Now my co op is

(04:58):
mostly my account, but up I've looked at their service
map and there are parts of the county. There are
parts of other counties, like adjacent counties that are part
of our co op. Now, I've always liked our co op. Now,
when I was a kid, things were less reliable. Electricity

(05:20):
wouldn't go off for a long time, but it would
go off more frequently. And then we went through a
period of time when I could have told you that
the electricity hadn't been off in ten years. Now that
is not the case now because, as is true with
all parts of the grid, including the grid that's out
in the country, it is much more fragile than it

(05:42):
used to be. In fact, there was a power outage Sunday.
Ours was out about thirty minutes in the afternoon, but
apparently parts of the county were out Sunday morning, and
they were out for pretty good while a cause a
tree fell on the line. Okay, uh, and they did.

(06:03):
You know, they had to track it down through some
pretty rough terrain to get to it when you're out
in the country. But and the whole point of this
is I'm gonna get to why I'm talking about them
in a minute. Uh So, I have an electrical cooperative.
That means that I actually am one of the co
owners of the electric company. In fact, we get a

(06:26):
dividend every year in December. Now they used to send
you a check. I think at this point in time
they actually just apply it to your December bill, which
is fine. I'm good either way because one way you
get money in a in a check. In the second
way you actually get a lower electric bill. So it's
kind of six and one have does other. Uh So, anyway,

(06:51):
there are other cooperatives, you know, it's they tend to
be like county. They might be a multi county co op.
I don't even there's probably a list somewhere where all
the co ops in Texas are. What are what they're
all named? Ours is a specific county, but there are
some that I've heard of that were like multi county. Okay,

(07:15):
so that's how I get my electricity. But one of
the things they do and this is a recent thing
they've only been doing in the last few years, is
that they publish a magazine. And in the magazine they
have very interesting articles, and they also have there'll be

(07:37):
a little section in the middle for your specific electric
co op if they want to publish something individual just
for you, h are the people in their in their
co op. And then they'll have recipes and different kinds
of things that'll talk about what's going on with your
own co op. Or they have like youth programs that

(08:00):
send a bunch of kids to Washington, d c. So
they're doing all kinds of stuff. With a co op,
there's a yearly meeting and then you know, there's a
board that gets elected and all that kind of stuff.
So and as I said, mine works well, I've heard
of other peoples that don't work quite as well. And
that has to do with who do you have serving

(08:20):
on the board or working at the office. You know,
this is where this is like one of things about
quote modern life is that you don't actually have any
kind of interaction with the people who do whatever. For example,
a friend of mine needed to get he lives in town,

(08:41):
and he needed to get the gas turned on at
his house or changed over to his name from the
name of the people who were renting him the house,
because they were going to bite. And first of all,
it took him forever to find out where he was
supposed to go. And secondly, when he went, he could
never find anybody there. That is not the case with

(09:04):
a co op, with my electric co op, or even
my phone co op. Because I have one of those two.
You know, I can go to the office. Now I
pay my bill online, but I don't have to pay
my own bill online. I could go in person and
pay my bill to the people that run the co op,
many of whom I know, some of whom I talk.
So it gives you a connection with the people who

(09:28):
are in charge of your electrical system. That's not a
bad thing at all anyway. So back to their magazine,
I did an episode it's been a while back, probably
even last year, where they gave prepping advice well flow
and behold. This month's magazine, which came to the mail yesterday,

(09:50):
also has prepping advice, and this one is prepping for
your pets. So I thought this was a good talk
for today, the prepping it it's taught okay, So the
name of the article, and this is in my UH
co ops part and this is not for the general

(10:11):
I actually looked online. I'll put a link to the
to the magazine in general and that'll give you its
articles that it comes with. But this particular article is
in the part that is only my co op and
so it wasn't on the website. UH. This one's called
include Pets in Disaster Planning, UH, and that is extremely important.

(10:35):
There's lots of things that we have to consider with pets,
and it made me think about things that I've read
in the past about pets and what happens to them
in a disaster. One of the things I remember I
remember hearing this or reading this, maybe I read it
that when the people in Great Britain were just absolutely

(11:02):
convinced that Germany was going to invade, which you know,
there was a lot of evidence to that effect. Obviously
they had invaded France and that didn't take long, so
there was there was great evidence that that was the case,
and you had the Blitz and all that stuff, and

(11:22):
so they were convinced that a German invasion was imminent.
Many people went to the vet and had their pets
put down. Well, and then they didn't invade, and so
you know, that was a great problem. I mean, I
think people had a real problem with that, dealing with

(11:44):
the fact that they put their pets down and they
really didn't have to. Now, granted, in the London Blitz,
when you know, bombs were falling and buildings were falling down,
having a pet would have been very, very difficult to
It would have been hard to take care of a pet.
So there's that. But in addition to that, and this

(12:11):
was also something I read, well, this is where I
saw the movie the Netflix series Five Days at Memorial,
which is the story of Memorial Hospital in New Orleans
steering Hurricane Katrina, which we talked about Tuesday. This or
Tes was aches no Sunday. We talked about Sunday because

(12:33):
it was the twentieth anniversary. So there were people who
had come to the hospital and that was their evacuation destination.
And I think there was about twelve hundred of them
who had come and they just come and stay. They
and they apparently this was an accepted practice and people

(12:56):
did it every time there was a hurricane. They if
they didn't have a way to get out of the city,
they would come to the hospital and they just hang
out in the hospital, and many of those people brought
their pets with them. Even the one of the men
that one of the doctors that was running the hospital,

(13:17):
you know, his wife had come and they were going
to ride out the storm there at the hospital, and
they had a big I don't even remember what kind
of dog they had. It was a big, giant dog.
I don't know. It might have been a Saint Bernard
because it was big and furry, and the problem for
this poor dog was the heat and the heat was horrific.

(13:38):
So what ended up happening, you know, obviously this the
whole story of that is that at the end they
helped some people die. Well, they also put all these
pets to sleep, and you know, that was part of
the horror of the time, the five days of Memorial

(13:58):
because they didn't have any walk they didn't have enough
water for themselves, much less for their pets. I will
say that putting my pets to sleep would be an
absolute last resort. I'm not gonna ever say I won't
do something because we don't always know what our circumstances

(14:20):
are gonna be like, and it's probably a good idea
to never say never. But it's gonna have to be
pretty bad. I mean, it's gonna have to be life
and death for everybody. I wouldn't want them to suffer
if I had no way to uh you know, if
if there really wasn't any any other option, but it

(14:40):
would have to be dire, That's all I'm saying. I
could feed and water them before id feeding water meat.
Uh anyway, but I thought about those two things. That's
not what it says in this article, but I did
think about those because those were both dire circumstances where
people thought there really wasn't any other option. But planning

(15:01):
ahead would help you to have better options, hopefully in
at least some cases, and so making sure that you had, say,
for example, you do have to shelter at home, do
you have enough food for your pet? Do you have
enough water for your pet? Do you have enough do
you have enough of the pets medications on hand? That

(15:22):
kind of thing. Do you have a way for you know,
it's kind of like one of things that preppers talk
about for themselves is sanitation. Do you have a way
for you to poop? Do you have a way for
your pet to poop. I think about this as it
relates to Snowmageddon. What we did when we knew Snowmageddon
was coming. And the good thing is we had plenty
of warning for that. But every time there was a

(15:44):
weather forecast, it was worse than the last weather forecast.
So things continue to get more and more serious as
we went along. And when I looked at the map
on the weather and the entire state of Texas, all
two hundred fifty four counties were under a storm, not watch,

(16:05):
but warning. That's kind of big deal. That meant we
weren't going anywhere, so we were hunkered down in our house.
But what we did is we shut down niece's house,
drained her pipes, and closed up her house, and she
and her pets came to spend the week with us,
with sister and me and our pets. So we kind

(16:28):
of had a big giant pet sleepover and it worked
out fine. Of course, you know, they could go outside
and they all loved playing in the snow, so that
that was you know, they were good with that. So
all of that worked, but we needed to make sure
and one of things I realized is snow again. You know,
Uncle would our electricity never went off. We were probably

(16:49):
one of the few places in Texas but we did
have If the electricity had gone off, then I would
we would not have had water, and I didn't have
enough water stored for that to be our case. So
since then I have rectified that made sure I have
more water stored so that we would have plenty of

(17:12):
water to drink, flush the toilets, that kind of thing. Now,
if something happened and for whatever the reason, the dogs
could not go outside, then I would have to set
them up some kind of option in the house. So
probably what I would do is I would take like

(17:34):
and we have a few of these around niece always
for the dogs that like to stay outside. She has
little kiddy swimming pools for those, and so we would
have one of those. I'd probably like put some dirt
and grass or something in it so that it made
them think it was outside, And that's what we would do.
For pet sanitation, cats of course can have a litter box. Uh,

(18:01):
that's one of the most important things. So if you're
planning for your pets because you're gonna bug in, then
you need to make sure you have all of the
supplies that they need. If you're planning on if if
it's something that you've got to bug out, then you've
got to prepare for that as well, having them a crate,

(18:22):
having some way to transport them, having leashes, having you know, harnesses. Uh.
I have a kind of a system in the back
seat of my car where I have little cables. They're
not very long. I think I got them at Amazon
where I and I have harnesses, and those cables are

(18:46):
actually hooked in the seats where if you had a
car seat for a baby, they hook into the there's
those little hooks. I don't know they're called hooks, but
they're they're they're a little metal contraption in between the
top of the seat and the bottom of the seat,
and it's what you hook a car seat into. And

(19:06):
that's what I have their cables attached to. So and
when they get in the car, they ride in the
back seat and have one of those hammock things that
fits over the back seat to keep the hair, you know,
contained and all that kind of stuff. And so that's
how they ride when we go somewhere. So they're nice
and secure. Because one of the things that a lot
of times happens to people is. You know, they may

(19:29):
accidentally have a wreck and then they're not capable of
knowing necessarily what's going on. But they had a pet
with them, and their pet gets loose and is disoriented
and scared and doesn't know what's going on, and they
run off, and then they never can find their pet again.
So when mine go somewhere, they are securely tied in

(19:55):
the back seat. But we would do that, you know,
we would have make sure we took food with us.
Bubba dog is allergic to himself, so therefore he has
to have allergy medicine every day. You know. I try
to make sure that I have their heart worms pills.

(20:19):
I have plenty of those. I try to keep at
least a six month supply in case there is a
supply chain shortage because you know, we do have those
now when we didn't used to have them in the past.
So I try to keep I try to keep them
plenty of supplies, like like I keep ours, So that's
important to have. I also take a picture of their

(20:44):
rabies vaccinations, and when they go to the doctor and
they get all their shots, I take a picture of that,
so I have that on my phone. But I also
put that documentation, the paper documentation with all my important papers,
so you know, they're there to grab quickly if I
need to, and that allows us to grab and go

(21:07):
if we had to. If we had to evacuate for
some reason, then we would obviously go someplace that would
allow pets, you know, and find somebody that allows pets
that I guess we'll sleep in our vehicle, but I
you know, where they go, where I go, they go.
So that's the way we're going to do this, and

(21:29):
I would. But one of the things that's important is
making sure that you have everything ready to do that
that their shots are up to date, and that you
have that documentation in case you did have to take
them somewhere. So the most important thing here is to
kind of think of pets like we think of the

(21:50):
rest of the family, and those of us who have
pets actually feel that way and have always felt that way.
So whatever I plan for us is what I plan
for them. And that's what was the gist of this
article is making sure that you have all of your
bases covered for your pets like you have covered for you. Now.

(22:13):
The page facing this page is not part of my
co op. It's part of the whole magazine, and it's
an article by the Texas Emergency Management what do they
call that, They just call it Texas Division of Emergency Management,

(22:35):
so td EM. And it is a preparedness guide for hurricanes,
and they talk about all the things to do about
a hurricane warning and when it's thirty six hours out,
when it's eighteen hours out, when it's six hours out.
And the most important thing is you know, depending on

(22:57):
where you are, whether it's better to hunker down in
a hurricane or it's better to get out in a hurricane,
and that depends on your location and where the hurricane
is and how powerful the hurricane is. One of the
things the article about the pets talks about is there's
a section that says after a disaster, and that's true

(23:20):
because you know, what's happening during the disaster is one thing,
but sometimes you know, all of us are going to
have like adrenaline dump and that kind of thing about
after something happens. So this and I'm just gonna read
this part says pets can become aggressive or defensive after

(23:44):
a disaster. Be aware of pets will being and protect
them from hazards to ensure their own and other safety
Consult your veatin area and if behavior problems persist, watch
your animals closely and keep them under your direct control.
As fens and gates may be damaged. And so if
you're talking about a disaster, that's a real possibility. Pets

(24:05):
can become disoriented, particularly if the disaster has disturbed scent
markers that normally allow them to find home. Be aware
of hazards at nose, pauw and hoof level, particularly debris,
spilled chemicals, fertilizers, and other substances that might not seem
dangerous to humans. Emergency action plans for your family should

(24:29):
include all animals. Okay, And this reminds me again, and
I tell the story on the episode where I was
on about the twentieth anniversary of Katrina. That weekend, there
were lots of people who because the hurricane was supposed
to be bad, but nobody knew it was going to

(24:49):
be that bad. Many people from South Louisiana came into
Texas and there are v's and camped in the state
parks and so and then after the hurricane, you know,
they planned to go home. Well that really wasn't an
option because some of them didn't have anything. In fact,
many of them didn't have anything to go home too,

(25:12):
and so then they were you know that that caused
the people to be in distress. Well I don't. I
don't know that these two dogs were from somebody who
was who had fled the hurricane. But that weekend was
the weekend when we had the two giant white dogs
that looked like white Pyrenees show up in our yard,

(25:35):
and they were clearly distressed. They were clearly disoriented. They
you could tell they were on a mission. They were looking.
They were either trying to get home or they were
trying to find their people. They obviously were dogs that
had been very well taken care of, but somehow another
they had gotten separated from their people. And as I

(25:56):
said in that episode, I have always wondered what happened
to those dogs, because they were one of them was
more friendly than the other one. The other one was
very reserved. We gave them water, they slept under the
side porch all day long because they were exhausted, and
then about the time we went to town to go
get them some food, they left. And so I always
wondered what happened to them, because they were very very

(26:19):
sweet dogs. But they clearly were not where they were
supposed to be, and they were trying to find their people.
And that's something to remember. Bubba Dog and Sissy Dog,
our babies. They would I could see them very easily
getting disoriented and not knowing where they were. I never

(26:42):
let them off a leash or out of their fenced yard.
And you know, they love a smell, and they would
go running, you know, chase a rabbit, squirrel, whatever, and
they could be in the next county. So I try
to be real careful about making sure that they are
a cure, and they are. Bubba Dog is very serious,

(27:07):
and I think he would probably do better. Cissy Dog is.
It's funny because she's much more emotional. She picks up
cues from us, and her little feelings can get hurt,
like at the drop of a hat. So she's more
almost like, more tender hearted. He's more stoic, and she's
more I guess girly. I mean she's just you know,

(27:30):
you can crush her feelings by just getting on to her,
you don't. You would never have to do anything worse
than that. I mean, she just has She is a
very tender hearted little dog. Anyway, I'm at work, got
stuff to do. I will talk to you. Tomorrow's Thursday,
so we'll be doing the next installment of Mary Maverick's memoirs.