Good strategies aren't always obvious

It looks like one of the lessons of Katarina will be an unexpected one: you will save more people if you're willing to save their pets as well (Philly paper; registration required).

"We've always assumed that pets would be left behind," said Thomas Sullivan, Montgomery County's director of public safety. "But it's unrealistic to think we're going to be able to force people, in great numbers, to do something they're not going to want to do."

Lots of the anecdotal stories have shown people sticking it out because they couldn't put their dog in the back of a friend's car and didn't want to leave it to starve; many pet owners would feel the same way. We don't want to abandon large numbers of people because they value their four-legged friends --- widen the compassion a bit and everybody wins. Many things seem obvious in hindsight.