The California Animal Rescue Rangers Evacuation Team (CARRET) is a group of volunteers from Escondido, California. They drive into wildfires with an evacuation plan for the hard-to-move animals, such as horses, livestock, and exotics, that get left behind by fleeing residents. CBS 8’s Jeff Zevely highlighted their efforts in a Zevely Zone segment for the station’s “America’s 250: Red, White, and You” series, CBS 8 reported. As fire danger continues to rise in Southern California, the team focuses on the animals that are most difficult to move on short notice.
CARRET president Jacqui Grande said her volunteers drive right into the fire to reach trapped animals. Grande said she has saved more than 10,000 animals over 20 years of doing this work. The team leans on specialists rather than generalists, with different volunteers trained for different kinds of animals.
The range spanning large livestock down to small reptiles is more than most emergency response groups can handle, since they don’t have personnel trained across that full spectrum. Grande said the team has volunteers who specialize in loading sheep, volunteers who specialize in loading goats, and volunteers who specialize in loading turtles. The movement and panic patterns of sheep and goats differ greatly from those of turtles, so each species requires a different approach to load safely.
Horses are a large part of the work, since they are heavy, easily spooked, and slow to load into a trailer under calm conditions, let alone with a fire approaching. The team coordinates with law enforcement and other responders during active evacuations, and body-worn camera footage from one San Diego area response shows the kind of scene the volunteers move through. The animals are then taken to staging sites and properties away from the fire.
Why Large Animal Evacuation Takes a Specialized Team
Evacuating a household pet during a wildfire is difficult enough, but a horse, a goat or a pig raises the difficulty considerably. Large animals require trailers, and loading a frightened animal into a trailer takes training, the right equipment, and time that a fast-moving fire doesn’t always allow. Owners who lack a trailer, or who are away from home when an evacuation order hits, often have no way to move their animals at all.
That gap is what volunteer teams like CARRET fill. San Diego County has built part of its emergency response around the same problem, with the San Diego Humane Society operating county-approved large-animal evacuation sites that provide staging for rescue vehicles and refuge for displaced animals. During major fires, that combination of volunteer crews and established evacuation sites is often what keeps livestock and horses from being left in the path of a fire.
How Southern California Residents Can Prepare Their Animals
The clearest lesson from teams that do this work is that animal evacuation has to be planned before a fire starts, not improvised during one. Ready-made steps include keeping a trailer accessible, maintaining current photos and identification for each animal, and knowing which fairgrounds, equestrian centers, or humane society sites accept large animals during emergencies. Some owners write a phone number directly on a horse’s halter in case the animal has to be released.
Groups like CARRET rely on donations to keep going, since fuel for the evacuation vehicles is one of their steady costs. Residents in fire-prone areas can also sign up in advance with local animal-response networks, so that a call for help during an evacuation reaches someone with a trailer and the training to use it. As of the CBS 8 report, CARRET was continuing to respond to Southern California fires as they came.