Pawprints of Katrina

by Cathy Scott

  The day before Red left, a veterinary technician provided doggie ice cream, and everybody gathered around Red for the farewell party. Then, on the day he left, employees showered him with going-away toys, tennis balls, and his favorite chewies. For the trip home, his new mom, Diane, bought him a black-and-orange Harley-Davidson T-shirt and a seat-belt harness. His belly belt (to hold up a partial diaper) was put on, and he was strapped into the front seat of Diane’s rental car. A Houston TV news crew was there to record Red’s big send-off.

  “He was sitting in the front seat of Diane’s car, ready for the ride,” Lucy said. “He thought all the attention was the coolest thing ever. He didn’t look back.”

  The next evening, Anderson Cooper did a follow-up piece and informed CNN viewers of Red’s adoption. Video was shown of Red running at high speed in his cart around the perimeter of Longwood’s dog park. Anderson described Red as an amazing, happy dog and wished Diane and Red well.

  Since arriving home in Florida with Red on June 1, 2006, Diane has continued his therapy by massaging and keeping his back legs moving and manually exercised. Although he’s still paralyzed by what his surgeon described as bruising to his spinal cord (which killed off part of it), Red’s tail now wags and he’s using his back thighs more and more, even jumping up a few inches for treats. The plate on his spine that was so prominent on his back, showing through his skin because he was so thin, is no longer visible. He has gained weight, his mange is gone, and he gets plenty of exercise in his cart.

  Alice Louviere, the surgery technician who worked on Red, credits Red’s regaining some feeling and use of his legs and tail to Diane’s continued work with him. “All the massaging and movement is what got his tail moving,” she said. “The fact that she kept that up is what has done it.”

  Despite the work it takes to keep Red clean and exercise him each day by putting him in and out of his carts (he now has four different types), Diane took on the task of caring for him with enthusiasm. She often says she needed Red as much as he needed her. She lost three family members over a three-year period, so, “Red takes care of me, too.”

  She took on a lot. Life for a mostly incontinent dog who weighs sixty-plus pounds means regular rinses to keep his skin clean and keep mange away, regular belly-belt changes (she has five on hand), and diaper changes throughout the day. Since Diane first adopted Red, he has graduated from his obsession with a purple squeaky toy that he treated like a baby to playing fetch with tennis balls. “If I bounce the ball, he bops up and catches it in his mouth. He can use his thighs now to jump up a little. He’s too funny. He still likes his squeaky toys, but he loves playing ball.” So they play ball several times a day, both in the house and in Diane’s backyard, and take daily walks around the neighborhood with Red in a cart, one of which Diane calls his “racing car.”

  Life for Red couldn’t be better, Diane reports. “He likes to roll on his back and flip his back legs back and forth. He wags his tail a lot more. The nerves are better. He’s muscular now. He seems like a very different dog. He is doing so well. He’s happy.”

  Peter Crowe, a volunteer from Virginia, learned a few lessons from Red. “One of the more obvious life lessons I learned from Red was to never give up and always persevere.” But that, he said, was an obvious lesson for anyone who laid eyes on Red and saw his smile. “There were subtler sides to Red, both in terms of his personality and, more importantly, the things he taught us about ourselves and our own humanity.” To him, Red was a symbol of “all the animals who suffered the ravages of pre- and post-Katrina times.

  “Red, this sweet creature with dogfighting in his breed’s lineage and his closely cropped ears,” Peter said, “was clearly a caricature of his past owner’s Southern macho ideas of power. By rescuing and nurturing this one special being, we were, in a sense, projecting the hopes of our rescue mission onto Red. If we could ease his suffering, spill our tears onto his forehead, and shower it with kisses, then we were, in a larger sense, putting our caring arms around and doing these same things to all of the other brave beings who suffered. If we could make him well, then we could make them all well. Only in that way could we comprehend—or better yet, be able to stomach—the scope of the awfulness of what we saw and, more importantly, what they went through. One can only hope that the wonderful final home Diane has provided for Red symbolizes and parallels what the future has in store for Katrina’s other animal victims.”

  Red’s presence on any given day at Celebration Station had a positive effect on volunteers and staffers. “After a hard day of work, we would all stream into the building, and then eat whatever someone had cooked for dinner,” Peter said. Still, because of his paralysis, Red needed constant care. “One of the last things we wanted to do was clean up after the uncontrolled bowel movements of a paraplegic dog,” Peter said, “no matter how sweet he was. This shared fatigue served as a sorting process, a winnowing out of the many Red admirers from the few Red devotees—those who, despite their fatigue, continued to help care for him well into the night. My interactions with Red, I shamefully admit, started as an admirer.”

  Peter at first assumed that one person was charged with caring for Red. “I truly thought his life was like that of the pampered lion in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy’s group all finally made it to the Emerald City. I was wrong. There were some very dedicated staff members who fed him and gave him his meds, and occasionally played with him, but on the whole, he spent his days stuck behind his barricade, looking for attention from anyone who would give it.” Red’s corner was a convalescent area for him because, with his injuries, he couldn’t go into the general population of dogs.

  Peter discovered a volunteer who had taken on the challenge of meeting Red’s needs. “She began going into his playpen,” he said, “cleaning up after his every accident, hooking him up to his chariot, and taking him for runs outside. His strength had inspired something in her, which then inspired something in me.”

  Once that volunteer left Celebration Station and returned home, Peter vowed to take over her self-appointed duties. “I went to Red one night and promised him that when his caretaker lady left, no matter how tired I was, I would carry her torch and take care of him as much as she had. I’m proud to say that I did so from that time on, until he was transported away from Celebration Station.”

  The big lesson Peter learned from Red, he said, was that “no matter how hard my day was, no matter what I had gone through, my day couldn’t end as long as another being was suffering. There was no quitting bell for his suffering, so why should I be bound by one?” Red, he said, “brought out in me depths of compassion that I had never before plumbed.”

  One night at the center particularly stood out for him. “On that night, I had put my dinner on hold three times to clean up after his happy bladder. I then headed to the showers to clean up. When I returned, most of the place was empty, with people having gone into New Orleans or to bed. The lights were on low, and I walked over to check on Red one last time before going to bed.”

  Red had soiled himself again. “He was looking guiltily at me,” Peter said. “His look had such a human element to it that I could have been looking at my own offspring. Since this was now the fourth time I was cleaning up his bedding, we were running very low on warm, fluffy materials, so I dug into Red’s emergency stash that I had secretly squirreled away and pulled out a soft comforter. After cleaning the plastic flooring of his excrement, I picked him up gingerly, minding his limp legs that would criss-cross during such lifts, set him aside, and placed his comforter in the back corner. Then, after nesting his comforter, I again picked him up, and laid him down as gently as I could on his new bed.

  “He looked up at me with a look of love I’ll never forget,” Peter continued. “I stroked his head, made sure his legs were crossed out in front of him, then kissed him and finally retired for the night.”

  The next morning while Peter was at the mess table having breakfast, a woman approached him. She said she’d
watched him the previous night from the balcony next to the sleeping area on the second floor. “She said that she had been moved to tears by how I had tended to Red, and, in particular, how gently I had picked him up and then placed him into his new bed. It still brings tears to my eyes when I think about the chain of events Red brought about. He inspired a person, who inspired me, who inspired and moved another person to tears—near strangers all interacting in deeply personal ways, and all brought about by this one beautiful being.”

  Red’s final day at Celebration Station was sad for many, including Peter. “It was my saddest,” he said. “I had heard murmurings of his being transported out, and it was approaching the end of February (when Celebration Station was to close), so that certainly seemed valid. But it wasn’t until someone came to me in the dog runs and told me to come say my good-byes that it hit me.”

  Peter walked to the back of the transport truck where a line of people were saying farewell. “Red was sitting in his crate, looking forlorn and obviously understanding what was going on,” Peter said. “The photos of that moment capture my unrestrained, unabashed stream of tears. I cried. Don Arnold, the ex-Marine trapper, cried. Dave Halperin, the original rescuer who had responded to the initial call to rescue Red, cried. We all hugged. This went on for thirty minutes. On his plastic crate I wrote ‘We’ll miss you, Red’ above his doorway, and then others followed suit, covering his crate with expressions of love.”

  Volunteers and staffers signed his plastic travel crate and then sent him on his way. One person wrote “Carry on, Champ.” Another, “Run like the wind, Red.” Others simply penned, “I love you, Red Dog.”

  “I added a final message,” Peter said. “Since Red was going to a rescue shelter in Texas, I wrote ‘Don’t mess with Red’ in big red letters.”

  Red, Peter said, did more than inspire volunteers with his “never quit” personality. “He helped to bring out the best, the most compassionate parts of a human,” he explained, “and then enabled us to share these deeply personal emotions with near strangers. Finally, he taught us that whatever limitations we imagine we have are all in our heads. What better test of the greatness of a being than this?”

  11

  Fifteen Minutes of Fame

  WE’VE LOST EVERYTHING, MOM,” twelve-year-old Nicholas Willheit told his mother after the family realized they wouldn’t be returning to their house in Chalmette anytime soon. “I lost my friends. I lost my things. All I want back is my dog.”

  Julie Willheit searched the Internet for hours each night trying to find Cujo’s photo on rescue sites, all in an effort to bring her son’s dog home to him. “Nicholas and Cujo grew up together,” Julie said. “Nicholas was my inspiration to find Cujo.”

  Eventually, Nicholas stopped talking about Cujo. So on a winter afternoon in November, more than two months after Hurricane Katrina, the last thing Nicholas thought he would see was his nine-year-old terrier-and-Poodle mix.

  Julie and her family were staying with friends, and each night Julie logged onto her friend’s computer, searching for a photo of Cujo and sending e-mails about him to rescue groups, including Best Friends, which had rescued him. A positive match was made, and Julie was put in touch with Cujo’s foster mom, with whom he’d been living in North Carolina since late September. They arranged to meet in Baytown, Texas.

  That day, Julie and her daughter drove to pick up Cujo. “When we pulled up, my daughter saw a van with the words ‘Katrina Rescue’ on the side. She started crying,” Julie said. “The woman was standing waiting for us, and Cujo was in the van in the front seat. I said his name—we call him Cujie. Right when I did that, he whipped around and started jumping over [the woman], trying to get to us.”

  When they put him in the car to take him home, “we were loving him to death. He was still thin. We bought him a ten-piece nugget meal and drove home.”

  Nicholas was playing in a football game that afternoon in Spring, Texas, so Julie drove her daughter and Cujo to the ball field. Before the game, Julie took the coach aside and told him they were planning to surprise her son after the game with his dog. “Let me handle it,” the coach told her.

  At the end of the game, Nicholas’s coach stopped him from walking off the field. “Wait a minute, Nicholas,” the coach said into a microphone. “We have a special prize for you.” Nicholas thought it was because his team had won the game and he was being singled out for playing well.

  “Look!” the coach said as he pointed toward one of the goal posts at the end of the field. Nicholas turned to see what his coach was pointing at. There, standing beside Randy Willheit, Nicholas’s father, was a dog.

  It couldn’t be, Nicholas thought. Then he knew. “Cujo!” the boy yelled. The dog ran across the field toward Nicholas, and Nicholas ran toward his dog. When they reached each other, Nicholas dropped to his knees and Cujo jumped up and began licking his face.

  The coach explained the reunion to the spectators in the stand. “The whole stadium was crying,” Julie said. Since the storm, the Willheits have moved back to the New Orleans area, but this time to Mandeville, north of Lake Pontchartrain, in a house on two and a half acres. “Cujo gets to run around on the property, and he loves it,” Julie said.

  It had been two and a half long months since the Willheits had left Cujo at the Chalmette Medical Center, where Julie worked before the storm. Julie’s husband and adult daughter, along with Cujo and a little Chihuahua named ChiChi, rode out the storm. Nicholas had evacuated earlier with his grandmother.

  When they learned they’d have to leave their dogs behind, Julie was beside herself. An army pilot had landed a helicopter on the roof and was evacuating people to the airport. “It was the people running the hospital, and not the army, who made the decision. They told us we couldn’t take our animals.”

  She took a risk keeping ChiChi with her, but ChiChi was small enough to fit in her bag. “I grabbed her, took her blanket, her toy, and a little bit of food I had left, put her in my bag, and zipped it up. When I sat down in the helicopter, it was so loud no one knew, but I kept thinking, They’ll find out and take her from me.” When Julie sat down in the chopper, her husband wasn’t happy and said he was afraid they’d be kicked off. “I told him, ‘Then I’ll get off the helicopter. I’ll stay if I have to. I’m not leaving her. I’ll take my chances.’ ”

  Cujo was too big to hide, so they had to leave him on the roof with Dennis Rizzuto and the other pets. Dennis, a generous man they had never before met, had volunteered to hand out food at the hospital, and he offered to stay behind and care for Cujo and several other dogs whose owners had gathered there. He told the pets’ owners that he would take the dogs to his Evangeline Street apartment when the water subsided and care for them until the families returned. He gave them all his address and phone number. “When Cujo was walked up the hospital ramp and handed to that man, Cujo looked back at me like he was saying, ‘Why aren’t you coming?’ It’s such a bad decision for people to have to make. It’s something no pet owner should ever have to go through.”

  After the helicopter landed at the airport, someone from Delta approached the Willheits to say a flight was leaving and pointed to where they should stand in line. “I still had ChiChi in the bag,” Julie said. “I was so scared they’d find her. I kept peeking in and putting water in a bottle cap for her. We stood in line for a while. Finally, I just pulled one of the flight attendants to the side. I said, ‘I have a dog.’ He said, ‘Where is it?’ I showed him. He looked at me and said, ‘You can hold her. That’s not an issue.’ He said to take her out of the bag so they could search it. ‘You might as well take her out now,’ the flight attendant told me. Everybody on the flight fell in love with her. They took pictures of us. When we boarded, they told me I didn’t have to put her back in the bag.” The CEO of Delta was on the flight, and he gave her a dog biscuit from his coat pocket. “Right then,” Julie said, “my heart was saying, ‘Here, everybody is fine with her, and I was forced to leave Cujo. They wou
ld have been okay with him, too. ’ ”

  The flight took them to Georgia. “When we came off the flight, reporters were there,” she said. “CNN interviewed us.” Julie’s family, who hadn’t yet heard from her, saw Julie walking off the plane holding her Chihuahua.

  When the Willheits went to Dennis’s apartment three weeks after the storm, the dogs were already gone. Dennis was, too. They left a note telling Dennis they were looking for Cujo, included their number, and wrote that they were in Texas. They didn’t even know if Dennis would be returning to the apartment. Julie was beside herself, not knowing what had happened to Cujo. She later learned that five days after Dennis took the pets to his building, he was ordered by police to leave the flood-damaged area.

  Unknown to the Willheits and the other pet guardians at the time was that Best Friends had rescued their dogs ten days after Dennis evacuated. A Dateline NBC crew had been with the team on September 15 filming the rescue. After the Dateline special about Best Friends’ rescues aired on Sunday, September 18, viewers called in to say they’d recognized their missing pets. As a result, those rescued and reunited included Cujo and other dogs—Tiny, Tinkerbelle, Ketel, Son, Buttons, and Agustas—and also a cat named Bubba, whose reunion was filmed by the Dateline crew.

  Bart Siegal never thought he’d see his cats again. Bart lived just a couple of blocks from where the first levees were breeched, and his living room filled to the ceiling in just ten minutes. He and his daughter made it to the roof with their two cats, Bubba and Bugsy. A rescue boat with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service picked them up a day later and took them to a bank in Chalmette, where they stayed for four days. When he and his daughter were evacuated from the bank, Bart was told that he couldn’t take his cats with him.