Antinuclear

• BY:RICK WALLACE, TOKYO CORRESPONDENT 
• From:The Australian 
• June 27, 2011 12:00AM

A SELF-DESCRIBED “animal rescue guerilla” has made a daring raid to the centre of Japan’s nuclear crisis to pluck to safety two dogs seen wandering around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

In recent months, Hiroshi Hoshi has made a series of trips to the radioactive dead zone around the plant to rescue distressed and abandoned pets while dodging roadblocks and police patrols.

He has come across countless animal corpses, dogs that had become cannibals and even an ostrich strolling the streets of a village within the 20km perimeter around the plant.

But perhaps the most amazing was the discovery via a camera trained permanently on the Fukushima Daiichi plant of the pair of Japanese Shiba dogs prowling around the highly radioactive plant more than three months after the beginning of the tsunami and nuclear crisis.

In the footage, the two biscuit-coloured dogs stand out clearly against the grey backdrop of wrecked reactor buildings and tangled metal, and they were spotted by supporters of Mr Hoshi, who were monitoring the internet feed of the camera.

On June 5, he and several sympathisers donned protective suits and skirted police roadblocks in their car and drove right into the plant to where the camera is based. Before long, they had found the dogs, whisked them into their car and got them back to safety.

“For the past three months they have had such a tough time,” Mr Hoshi says. “When we got them, they weren’t even able to urinate or eat any kind of hard food. So we called up an emergency medical centre in Yokohama and they checked and treated them and then we took them to our home.”

The dogs wore radiation dosimeters for a few days, which showed they had been exposed to significant amounts of radiation, but they were given a clean bill of health. Mr Hoshi believes their owner left them a lot of food when they evacuated and that might have kept them alive and indoors, away from the fallout. When the food ran out, he believes they took to prowling the plant’s grounds for sustenance.

The two dogs are probably brothers, which may explain why they appeared to have stuck together during their ordeal.

Chie Hoffman, a dog lover who lives near Yokohama and learnt of the dogs’ rescue through Facebook, has agreed to give the animals a foster home. “When they came to my house about two weeks ago, they were scared to death and so nervous,” she says.

“We could see their ribs sticking out and they wouldn’t go out or drink water. I decided to keep them and about three days later they started to eat and drink and now they are doing very well.”

Ms Hoffman, who owns a further three dogs and three cats, tells The Australian she has grown to like the two Fukushima dogs a lot, but has resisted the urge to name them for now in case their owner recognises them and decides they want them back.

Such happy endings are rare for the tens of thousands of animals abandoned in the dead zone around the Fukushima plant.

Some 80,000 people have been forced to flee the evacuation zone, and in many cases they have left behind pets, which are now dying of thirst or starvation. About 5800 licensed dogs are believed to be in the evacuation zone, plus thousands of unregistered animals and cats, along with beef and dairy cattle, pigs and a handful of exotic animals, such as the ostrich.

The Japanese government has been slammed for failing to allow owners back to their homes within the evacuation zone frequently enough to care for their pets. The government has also failed to implement a program to kill doomed livestock humanely.

Animals are being left to die, something that spurred Mr Hoshi, who has no background in activism, to take on his rescue role.

“We were talking about this issue as a family after we saw news reports about it and my son, Leo, said: ‘I can’t ignore this – I’ve got to go feed them’,” he says.

“So the three of us, Leo and my wife and I, decided to go together.”

Since April, Mr Hoshi and his supporters have made a series of raids into the radioactive zone, plucking dogs and cats to safety.

He has found dogs dead on leashes and in cages, and has determined from carcasses and wounds on live dogs that some have turned to killing and eating each other to stay alive.

Mr Hoshi is furious about the indifference of authorities and has challenged police to arrest him after several of his clandestine raids so he can draw more attention to his complaints in court.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/activist-hiroshi-hoshi-defies-fallout-to-pluck-animals-from-fukushima-dead-zone/story-e6frg6so-1226082355948