When Hurricane Delta was closing in as a Category 4 storm, most people were thinking about how to protect themselves. Ricardo Pimentel was thinking about his 300 dogs.
Ricardo is the founder of Tierra de Animales, an animal sanctuary in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula that he has been building for over a decade.
As the storm approached in early October, he realized there were simply no hurricane-proof shelters available for the hundreds of dogs in his care.
So he did the only thing that made sense to him.
He brought all of them inside.
All day long, Ricardo and his team worked to move nearly 300 dogs into the house, one by one.
Not all of them get along. Normally they live in separate areas of the sanctuary. But somehow, surrounded by the sound of howling winds outside, they settled in together.
His daughter’s bedroom became a safe room for baby chickens, hedgehogs, and tiny turtles. His son’s bathroom housed almost all the cats. Every corner of the house was filled with life.
“The first thing I thought was, let’s put all the dogs inside,” Ricardo said. “There was nothing else in my mind.”
By nightfall, he was as ready as anyone can be before a hurricane. Inside, there was, as he put it himself, “a big poop disaster and dogs destroying things.” But every single animal was safe.
The storm’s aftermath left serious damage across the property. Fences broken. Years of work undone overnight. Ricardo admitted it was deeply disappointing to see a decade of effort scattered across the ground.
But the next morning, he, his family, his workers, and his volunteers got back up and started putting it all back together.
When photos of the wall-to-wall dogs inside his home spread across the internet, they went viral almost instantly, bringing in thousands of messages and donations from around the world.
Ricardo never intended for it to happen that way.
“It doesn’t matter if the house is dirty, it can be cleaned,” he said. “What’s beautiful is to see them happy, healthy, and safe, without wounds and with the possibility of being adopted.”
He hopes that somewhere out there, someone will see these photos and decide to become part of the story.
“We would like to think that somebody would say: I adopted a dog saved from that famous Hurricane Delta.”
Source:
1. People – ” Safety First! Man Opens Up His Home to 300 Dogs, Sheltering Them from Hurricane Delta”
2. TheDoDo – “Man Brings 300 Dogs Into His House To Protect Them From Hurricane”