Ms Streets And Trips

Activist Hiroshi Hoshi defies fallout to pluck animals from Fukushima dead zone

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.

"We knew those dogs would die eventually if they were left alone," Mr Hoshi, 55, who runs an car parts distribution business, tells The Australian. "I thought, 'If we can get there and possibly save them, why not?'."

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.

Microsoft Streets and Trips 2008 [OLD VERSION] | Descktop And Home ...

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