Tania was working when the ground began to shake.
She is a house-call veterinarian in Colombia, and that day she had several dogs in her care when the earthquake struck, which so far has left 132 dead and 570 injured. There was no time to get them all out. So she made a decision in seconds: to stay.
“I couldn’t evacuate them all, so I decided to stay with them”, she later shared on her social media. She said the quake “caught her at work” and that her “instinct was to stay” with the animals so they would not face the fear alone. In the video she shared, the movements of the earthquake can be heard as she hugs them and speaks softly to them, trying to calm what she could not explain to them with words.
While the country counted its losses, Tania chose not to let go of the leashes of those dogs who were trembling as much as the ground beneath their paws.