ISTANBUL, March 20 (Xinhua) -- Rumeysa Gurbuz, a Turkish nurse, was tearful when recalling the reunion moment with her cat Leyla after the tragic earthquakes separated them apart last month.
When the tremors jolted the Hatay province of Türkiye on Feb. 6, Gurbuz was injured and taken to Istanbul for treatment, during which she placed an ad on Facebook trying to find Leyla.
Three weeks later, an international volunteer group found her cat, who crawled out of debris after hearing the voice of her owner calling out to her. The voice was a recording suggested by the volunteer group to help them find her pet.
Soon after the catastrophe, cries for help from under the debris drew in thousands of earnest volunteers and experienced search and rescue teams from around the world. But not all the cries came from people.
Many animals, either someone's beloved pet or a neighborhood stray, have also been trapped beneath tons of concrete.
To save these four-legged victims, the teams of Humane Society International (HSI), a leading force for animal protection, arrived in Türkiye after the quakes, working hand in hand with their Turkish peers.
Kelly Donithan, HSI's director of animal disaster response, told Xinhua via an email interview that during their rescue operations which lasted almost a month, teams had gone out on several search-and-rescue missions per day, which involved scanning the area for signs of animals and visiting specific locations provided by anxious pet owners.
"We would often be passed on Facebook messages left by desperate people looking for their pets, and we used that information to locate their homes and search," Donithan said. The animals were often very traumatized and scared to come out, requiring a great deal of patience and perseverance before they could be rescued.
"Sometimes, we made contact with the owners and asked them to send us voice recordings of them calling their pets, and this proved very useful on a number of occasions in encouraging their animals to emerge from their hideouts," noted Donithan. "I would say we were witness to or otherwise involved in between 10 - 15 reunions between people and their animals."
Emre Bulunmaz, a Turkish citizen, was one animal lover who rushed to the town of Elbistan in the southern province of Kahramanmaras on the day of the disaster.
He spent four days there, entering damaged and abandoned buildings alongside trained personnel from the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) to extract cats, dogs, and even one very talkative parakeet.
"I gather wounded animals from apartments and bring them to a clinic in Istanbul," Bulunmaz told Xinhua in an interview. "We then try to find them new homes," as many had lost their owners.
Deniz Kara, from the southwestern province of Mugla, went to Hatay on the fourth day of the disaster along with her 15-person search-and-rescue team named Mugla 911. As an animal lover, she was rescuing people in coordination with AFAD in the area, but also kept an eye out for any animals in need.
"Some people came over and told us their pets were still trapped in their homes," she told Xinhua. "We entered the buildings that we could (to recover them)," she said.
But most of the time, it was helping animals out in the street in any way they could, such as giving them food.
She recounted one goat that had just given birth on the night of the earthquake and injured her rear leg in the ensuing chaos. "There was no medical personnel nearby, so we administered first aid. She made a quick recovery during our time there," she said. ■