Bono

Animals like Bono are the invisible victims of natural disasters all too often. Not so long ago, in my homeland New Zealand, Christchurch was the country’s most stately and unruffled city. Modeled on English tradition, a handsome stone cathedral dominated an attractive square in the city center. With the river Avon meandering past gracious buildings and parkland, Christchurch seemed solid as the stones that shaped the cathedral itself.

All that changed at lunchtime on February 22, 2011. A massive earthquake toppled the cathedral’s steeple, decimated buildings, and claimed 185 human lives. Years later, the city is still piecing itself together after the physical and emotional devastation.

The number of animals crushed under the rubble was never counted, and the earthquake’s impact on those that survived was enormous. Cats vanished for days on end, dogs fled in panic. Even smaller animals were traumatized. Caged birds batted their wings against their cages and pecked at their feathers.

Some people risked their lives breaking through cordoned off areas to rescue pets from collapsed buildings. Others were too fraught and focused on piecing their own lives together to worry about their four-legged friends.

As the dust settled in the days following the earthquake, hundreds of bewildered cats and dogs were taken off the streets and housed in shelters. Sadly, not all pets were reunited with their owners. Some people, whose lives and houses were in tatters, didn’t feel able to take their animals back. Many pets were euthanized.

Like his Christchurch cousins, Bono was a casualty of a catastrophic event of dimensions beyond human control.

He was a mystery cat. No one at Bideawee seemed to know the exact circumstances he’d been rescued from, or how he’d been given that name, but it suited him to the spikes of his jaunty mane.

On October 22, 2012, his human owner would have been unaware of the trough of low air pressure sucking moisture from the Caribbean Sea off the coast of distant Nicaragua.

However, there’s a chance that Bono, along with 14 million other felines on the eastern seaboard, sensed a subtle change in the air pressure. The connection between cats and climate has been acknowledged for centuries. The father of smallpox inoculation, Dr. Edward Jenner, paid homage to feline weather forecasters in his poem “Signs of Rain”: “Puss on the hearth, with velvet paws Sits wiping o’er her whiskered jaws.”

Long before Jenner wrote those lines, sailors kept a weather eye on the ship’s cat. To them the seafaring feline was more than just a rat catcher and reminder of cozy fireplaces at home. When they saw the resident feline pawing her face, they knew rough weather was over the horizon. There have been so many reports of cats wiping their faces and ears before a storm, it’s thought the electromagnetic changes and low atmospheric pressure bring on a type of migraine. If it’s true, the wiping of the face and ears seems logical.

Other nautical superstitions are less feasible. If a cat tried to abandon ship or take her kittens ashore, sailors panicked because it meant trouble lay ahead. A sneezing cat meant rain, a frisky feline was a sign wind was coming, and if a cat licked its fur against the grain, a hailstorm was in the making. Some sailors even believed a feline could create a storm with magic stored in her tail. No doubt generations of cats did nothing to make them believe otherwise.

Though many Europeans shunned black cats as unlucky, British sailors prized them as good omens. With his panache, Bono would have made an excellent ship’s mascot.

The Atlantic hurricane season was particularly tumultuous in 2012. Many scientists pointed a finger at global warming. Hurricanes are fueled on warmth, and off the east coast of the United States, the ocean’s surface temperature was much higher than usual.

As the storm hurtled toward Jamaica at 80 mph, it was christened Sandy—a benign name reminiscent of beach towels and sunscreen. Two days later, the cyclone raged across Haiti claiming more than fifty human lives in floods and mudslides. It whirled on to Cuba and eventually left the Caribbean with a death toll of seventy to its name.

Witnessing the devastation on their TV screens in the comfort of their living rooms, most New Yorkers would have assumed the storm would conform to the usual pattern, heading out to sea before shrinking to a mere puff over the steely Atlantic. But as Sandy churned north off the coast of Georgia and the Carolinas, meteorologists noticed an unusual combination of atmospheric conditions. The hurricane made a sharp turn and morphed into a super storm raging across 1,000 miles with Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, and New York in its path. To make a dangerous situation deadlier, Sandy’s arrival was due to coincide with a full moon and exceptionally high tides.