Epilogue
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If you were to ask animal welfare officials what they need most in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, they would not say money.
Oh, they could always use more. Shelters need to be rebuilt, more spay and neuter programs should be started, more equipment is needed for disaster operations. But animal lovers have been generous. Over the last eight months, they donated more than $34 million dollars to the Humane Society of the United States, to the ASPCA, and many millions more to dozens of other organizations across the nation.
What officials want more than anything is a new way of looking at animals and how they fit into the fabric of our lives. Kathy Warnick, president of the Humane Society of Missouri, says it’s pretty simple really. Pets are family members. And they need to be treated just that way.
When a disaster looms, families ought to be encouraged to take their pets with them, not leave them behind. Disaster relief agencies should be ready to feed these pets and house them with their families or at least close by.
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Warnick, along with her counterparts Tara High in Gulfport, Laura Maloney in New Orleans, and Patricia Mercer in Houston, have spent a great deal of the past year since Katrina promoting local, state, and federal legislation that incorporate animals into disaster relief operations. On the federal level, the legislation is called the PETS Act. It would require all local and state emergency preparedness authorities to include in their evacuation plans how they will accommodate household pets and service animals in case of a disaster. A grant program would be established to fund those planning efforts.
“People died because they refused to leave their pets behind,” Maloney said. “And people who did leave their pets risked their lives to re-enter New Orleans after the hurricane. That should never happen again.”
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Maloney took her first vacation eight months after Hurricane Katrina struck. Actually, it was a working vacation. She was answering her e-mail from overseas and making big plans. The Louisiana SPCA has found a site for a brand new animal shelter on 10 acres in Algiers, not far the organization’s temporary shelter. It will be state-of-the-art; an $8.5 million facility with room for about 300 animals. They have room to make it larger still, but Maloney is waiting to see just how many residents will move back to New Orleans and how many pets they will bring. She is conservative by nature, a planner steeped in the numbers.
Maintaining a grip on the numbers became increasingly important as the animal rescue effort wound down in November and December of 2005. As long as three months after Katrina, some die-hard animal rescue groups insisted that thousands of animals were still loose on the streets of New Orleans. The conflicting reports from her field officers led Maloney to develop a fresh assessment that included reports from two team members from each national animal organization as well as some of the grass roots workers. The team concluded that the numbers were even less than they had expected. Regardless of the numbers, the LA/SPCA developed an innovative trapping program for hard-to-catch animals. Thousands of volunteers captured both owned and stray animals that had lived on the streets before Katrina struck. And thanks to a substantial donation from the ASPCA, the Louisiana organization is developing a low cost sterilization program to reduce the stray population even further.
Maloney feels optimistic about the future for animals in her town. “I’ve often said that my work with the Louisiana SPCA is the most rewarding, fulfilling thing I have ever done,” she commented. “I have always relished the challenges of working in animal welfare in Louisiana, and particularly in New Orleans, where the need is great. In spite of Katrina, and in a strange way, because of Katrina, I still do.”
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In Mississippi, the Humane Society already has its new shelter up and running, far away from the noisy airport and the smelly sewage treatment plant. It’s a bright and airy place, where visitors are greeted with warm smiles and a big number is posted on a bulletin board next to the front desk telling everyone how many animals they’ve saved today.
Between October 1, 2005 and February 2006, the shelter transported more than 1,200 adoptable animals through its Love Train program to shelters out of state. HSSM has also sponsored a microchip clinic that has provided valuable identification to thousands of animals in the region and its spay/neuter program has serviced thousands as well.
Tara High says she doesn’t regret for one minute giving up a more lucrative job in real estate to take on the leadership of the Humane Society of Southern Mississippi.
“Our lives will never be as they were before the hurricane and our road to recovery is still very long,” she said. “However, each day we are moving closer to the time when the ‘new normal’ is something we can accept and embrace.”
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In Houston, Patricia Mercer calls her agency’s response to the storm “our finest hour.” Actually, we should say storms because after the Houston SPCA helped everyone out with Katrina, it turned on a dime on September 24 and responded to Hurricane Rita, which struck southeast Texas with winds clocked at up to 180 miles an hour. After having participated in the rescue and sheltering of more than 1,500 animals, the Houston SPCA began to evacuate its own shelter. Fortunately, Rita veered to the east of Houston in the final hours before landfall, and the agency was able to help hard hit areas in counties to the south. In all, the organization cared for over 8000 animals and brought to its shelter more than 1,500 in need of immediate care.
What the Houston staffers and volunteers did not only touched thousands of animals and their families, but thousands of others across the nation, not the least of which were children. In September, Patricia Mercer got two letters from Teresa and Hannah of Beltsville, Maryland. Each had decorated their letters in crayon showing the plight of animals caught up in the hurricane. Hannah’s showed a kitty cat floating atop a television set. Inside one of the envelopes was a check.
“Dear Houston SPCA,” the letter written by Hannah read. “I love animals. I saw dogs and cats on the TV drinking bad water after Hurricane Katrina and I felt bad. I wanted to help save them. My friend Teresa and I made bracelets to sell and raise money to give to you. We sold lots of bracelets and raised $222.29. Please use this money to help the animals that lost their homes in the hurricanes and find their owners or new homes.”
And so they did.
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Three months after adopting Cocoa, her Katrina rescue dog, Stephanie Engle got a call that she was both hoping for and dreading. It was a staffer from the Humane Society of Missouri saying the agency may have found Cocoa’s owner.
Engle couldn’t stop crying as she drove Cocoa back to St. Louis to be photographed for identification by her owners. Stephanie kept telling herself that it would be best for Cocoa to be returned to her original owners — wherever that home might be.
As it turned out, Cocoa didn’t match the owner’s description. So Cocoa is still with Engle and her son. Engle can’t imagine their lives without Cocoa. But, she won’t forget that there are others, somewhere, who miss her. “Even now, if (her original owners) came to me, I’d still give her back,” she said. But it would break Stephanie’s heart.
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Mette Nichols and Bonnie Dean of the Humane Society of Missouri left St. Louis as the most casual of acquaintances. They returned after sharing a life-changing experience. They are now close friends. When they talk, they often wonder about the dogs they worked with, especially the loveable Houdini-like pit bull that Nichols called Marshmallow. The last Nichols had heard, Marshmallow had a bed in the Animal Protective League Office in Springfield, Illinois; given his reputation, the staffers hadn’t even tried to crate him. Nichols had checked on him shortly after returning to St. Louis in late September. She couldn’t call back. If Marshmallow hadn’t survived the heartworms, she didn’t want to know. It would be too painful.
Marshmallow did find a home. When the Springfield shelter put out a plea for a foster home, Kari Chastain and Jennifer Beavers answered the call.
Chastain works nights in juvenile detention in Springfield. She shares a house with Beavers, who works daytime hours. They both love animals, and have a tag-team system of round-the-clock care with their complementary work schedules. Chastain volunteers at the APL, and got the email about the pit bull with heartworms who needed a home. The staff members of the Springfield APL had renamed the dog Ponch, for Lake Ponchartrain. By the time Chastain heard of him, he had been diagnosed as having hepatitis as well as heart worm. She brought him home in October, and they spent a lot of their time together in the backyard, sitting in the sun and enjoying the beautiful fall weather. Ponch loved that yard. It might have been all the scents left behind by the foster dogs Chastain and Beavers had cared for over the years. When Ponch was in the house, he slept in the Lazy-boy, making sure that Chastain was close by.
Six days after going home with Chastain, Ponch became very ill. He died in Chastain’s arms.
Chastain wishes she could have done more for him. At Christmas, she took vacation time to volunteer at an animal shelter in Tylertown, Mississippi. She found some solace in helping other animals that were caught in the hurricane. Because she couldn’t save Ponch, she couldn’t let it end there. She had to do more.
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There’s always more work to be done. That’s what staffers at the Humane Society of Missouri tell each other in some way every day. After HSMO’s rescue team returned from its arduous month-long mission, Kathy Warnick sent another team back to New Orleans in November. Tim Rickey and Christine Bailey rescued more pets and helped train the new staff members that the Louisiana SPCA was bringing on board.
Now Warnick and her staff are at work developing fresh approaches to disaster planning, this time in their own back yard. A good part of southeast Missouri sits on a fault line. In the 19th century, the New Madrid fault spawned one of the strongest earthquakes ever to strike North America. Seismologists say it could happen again, and be far more devastating.
Warnick knows that if that occurs, she can count on her counterparts like Maloney, Mercer, and High to lend a hand.
That’s called loyalty. And it’s not just a human quality. It is the province of pets. That’s why animal protection is so important, Warnick says. And why in the event of a disaster, they should never be left behind.
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