From Saturday, rescuing animals is officially part of Portugal's civil protection
Law 38/2026, published on Monday, writes animal search, rescue and first aid into the Civil Protection Framework Law and the SIOPS command system, and gives the national veterinary authority a seat on the planning commissions.
Anyone who has watched a wildfire creep towards a village knows how it goes. The people get out, and then there is the dog on the chain, the chickens, the horse in the field, the cow nobody can load into a van. Until now, that was your problem to solve. It is about to become everybody’s.
Law 38/2026 was published in the official gazette on Monday and takes effect on Saturday. It is short to describe and wide in its consequences: animal search, rescue and first aid are now inside the remit of civil protection, through amendments to the Civil Protection Framework Law and to SIOPS, the integrated command system that runs the ground during a real incident.
What actually changes
From Saturday, helping animals becomes part of municipal civil protection work. That means it stops depending on the goodwill of whoever happens to be on shift and becomes a planning obligation — councils have to set out emergency arrangements for finding, rescuing and treating animals in a disaster or accident.
There is a second change that outsiders will barely notice and insiders will feel immediately. The National Civil Protection Commission gains a member for animal health and welfare, appointed by DGAV, the national food and veterinary authority. District commissions get one too. In other words, when the plans are drawn up, somebody in the room is there specifically to point out that there are animals outside as well.
Where the law came from
The proposal came from PAN, the animal-and-nature party, which had spent years pushing for a national animal search and rescue plan folded into disaster response. In a country that burns every summer the argument writes itself: in rural fires, floods and storms, animals rarely feature in the plan, and the people who try to save them end up improvising, sometimes at real risk to themselves.
It lands in a year when more than 30,000 hectares have already burned and crews have moved from one fire to the next, as they did when the Valpaços blaze jumped across to Mirandela. It is also one more piece of a summer that has redrawn Portugal’s emergency rulebook, starting with the new INEM statute that came into force on 1 August.
The full text is published in the Diário da República.
Image: Globetrotter19 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)
