A Pitiless War Leaves Behind Voiceless Lives

Every war leaves behind its share of the forgotten. Yet one group is rarely mentioned – or poorly understood: animals. In a Lebanon, where abandonment is already widespread, war has only deepened a crisis long exacerbated by years of economic crisis. To human suffering is thus added a silent, invisible anguish – one that rarely finds a place in the collective narrative.

This phenomenon also reveals a deeper fracture. Abandoning an animal in wartime is not always an act of deliberate cruelty, but sometimes the result of collapse. When everything is scarce – food, medicine, shelter – the hierarchy of needs asserts itself with brutal force. In such circumstances, the animal can come to be seen as an additional burden.

For many, animals remain secondary – companions sometimes adopted on a whim, like objects that can just as easily be discarded. And when urgency forces people to flee, some take to the road, leaving behind what suddenly seems to have lost all value. Dogs and cats, but also birds and more exotic animals, are left to fend for themselves, defenseless in environments that have turned hostile.

This reality does not arise in a vacuum. It is rooted in a context where animal protection, though theoretically enshrined in law, remains largely ineffective. In the absence of political will and adequate resources, violations proliferate: wildlife trafficking, abuse, the mass killing of migratory birds, even dynamite fishing. It is an entire chain of normalized violence – often pushed to the margins, as though it mattered less because it does not directly concern humans. Yet it is precisely this chain that sustains the balance on which human survival itself depends.

Complex Rescues

In this deteriorating landscape, it is the most vulnerable who pay the highest price. Associations, already weakened by the financial crisis, struggle to sustain their activities. Like Beta and Animals Lebanon, as well as numerous grassroots groups and anonymous volunteers, they carry on nonetheless – often at the limits of their resources. Their work is sometimes a matter of absolute urgency: intervening in the rubble, responding to distress calls, risking their lives to save animals trapped, injured, or forgotten.

Yet the obstacles are many and continue to mount. Rescues are becoming increasingly complex in a context of permanent insecurity. International adoptions, long a possible solution, are becoming rarer. Transport costs have soared, particularly since Middle East Airlines is now the only carrier operating at Rafic Hariri International Airport, making each transfer nearly unaffordable. Added to this is a general exhaustion – that of volunteers, donors, and a system now operating under constant strain.

There is another reality as well – more nuanced, often overlooked: that of those who refuse to abandon their animals. Displaced families crowd into already cramped apartments, sometimes with several generations under one roof, and still strive to keep their animals with them. Yet this forced coexistence is not without tension. Limited space, fear, and at times reluctance rooted in religious beliefs – particularly regarding dogs – turn the presence of animals into an added source of strain in an already overwhelmed daily life.

Admittedly, certain images circulate, almost reassuring in appearance: a cat in a cage beneath a makeshift tent, a dog pressed against its owner on a mattress laid directly on the floor. They speak to a genuine attachment, to a refusal to abandon at any cost. But as moving as these images may be, they should not obscure the scale of the phenomenon. For every animal saved or protected, how many are left by the roadside – wandering, starving, condemned to survive in indifference?

Abandoning animals in times of war is not a mere collateral damage. It reveals, by contrast, our relationship with living beings, with responsibility, and with what we choose to consider essential – or not – when everything is in upheaval. Perhaps it is here that the core is tested: in the ability, even amid chaos, not to entirely forsake what connects us to the rest of the living world.

Between Italy, which grants paid leave to care for a sick or injured animal, and Spain, which has passed a law recognizing pets as “sentient beings” rather than mere objects or property – in other words, family members – and France, which is supposed to be advancing on this front but continues to run advertising campaigns encouraging hunting, one can agree that the margin is wide. Lebanon, however, can take some satisfaction in the small steps it is making.