by Cathy Scott
In a similar case, a woman arrived at base camp looking for her female Siamese kitten. She found one, but the kitten was much younger than the cat she was looking for. This one, barely eight weeks old, was born just before the storm. Plus—and this made the reunion unlikely—this kitten was rescued twenty miles from where the woman’s kitty was left. “She swam twenty miles!” the woman told volunteers. No one had the heart to tell her a kitten that age could not have survived drifting twenty miles in storm waters. No inquiries had been made about the rescued kitten, so the woman filled out foster paperwork, even though she believed she had found her own lost kitty.
When pet owner John David found a photo in a lost-and-found binder of Sadie, his tan Chow, he returned to base camp a second time to make sure she wasn’t in a run he’d overlooked. He was given contact information for the foster home in northern California where Sadie was staying. Then he got in his car and drove twenty-three hundred miles to the San Francisco Bay Area to pick her up. He didn’t want to wait for transportation arrangements to be made. He couldn’t take another day without Sadie. He wanted her home with his other two dogs.
John had not left Sadie behind. On August 29, he had taken the three-year-old dog to work with him in downtown New Orleans and left his other two dogs, Nicky and Andy, at his home just outside the French Quarter. When John left for an appointment in Gulfport, Sadie stayed with an employee at his Julia Street flower shop. Once John heard radio reports that the storm was looming, he tried to drive back to New Orleans, but police at roadblocks turned him away. He was not able to make it home near the French Quarter, either. He was forced to turn around. Then, a few days later, on CNN, he watched as a military officer jumped the fence to his home, “and there were my other two dogs. I knew they were okay.” When he was allowed back in, he returned to his home and learned that neighbors had left food and water for his dogs. “It really restores my faith in people,” he said. “It was amazing to me.” There were signs that the two dogs had escaped the storm water by going into the house from the yard, where he’d left them, to the second floor. And that’s where they stayed until the water receded. He also discovered that his dogs had gone through a case of vitamins. “These dogs literally chewed all my vitamin bottles open. You can’t tell me dogs don’t know what’s good for them,” he added. “They opened and ate them all.”
Sadie, meanwhile, was still gone from the store. John was determined to get her back. When Sadie saw John for the first time after he arrived in northern California, “she came running up to me, put her paws on my shoulders and started licking my face,” he said. “She is just a big ol’ baby.” She looked at him, he said, as if to say, “I’ve been sitting here waiting and saying, ‘Where have you been?’ ” He put her in their car, and they drove back to Louisiana.
Sadie still goes to work with John each day. But now, even for out-of-state business trips, “I take her with me, and she doesn’t leave my side. She has always been close to me. Since she’s been back, we’re even closer.”
Sadie, John says, doesn’t think she’s a dog. “She’s so much more. She’s my friend. I just don’t know what I’d do without her.”
For pet owners like Laneka Campbell, Reggie Williams, and John David, finding their dogs in the Camp Tylertown binders—proof positive that they had been saved—was comforting. Those binders were their link to their pets, putting them one step closer to getting them back.
“I was so amazed when I looked in a book of photos, and there was Sadie,” John said.
15
Reunions
FOR MANY OF THE VOLUNTEERS working with rescued animals, their mission was to reunite pets with their owners. In the case of Elana Gerson, a volunteer caregiver, a phone call made all the difference in one family’s life. Elana was volunteering in the dog area at the Celebration Station triage center in January 2006 when she noticed that a yellow Lab’s original ID tag was still on her collar. Elana used her cell phone to dial the number. Amy Kimball, Sadie’s person, answered the phone.
Amy couldn’t get to Sadie quickly enough. She and her sister-in-law, Karen, jumped in the car and drove to Celebration Station from St. Bernard Parish. It was normally a forty-five-minute drive, but Amy and Karen made it in twenty minutes. When they arrived, Amy told workers that Sadie had had an angel—her brother-in-law Walter—looking after her. It was nothing short of a miracle, she said, that brought Sadie back to them after more than four months of being apart.
The last time Amy had seen Sadie was on August 28, 2005, in the home she shared with her fiancé, Tommy Cosse, in St. Bernard Parish. They evacuated before the hurricane and believed they’d be back in a couple of days. Before leaving, they set out food and water for Sadie. But their neighborhood was one of the hardest hit, and they weren’t allowed back in for several weeks. When residents were allowed to return home, Tommy drove to their house, hoping Sadie was still there and okay. When he found the remains of a dog in the side yard, he reported to Amy that Sadie hadn’t made it. After all, for fifteen days, the parish had been flooded with standing water; it would have been difficult for Sadie to survive.
Tommy’s brother Walter, however, wasn’t convinced that it was Sadie who had perished on the side of their house. He insisted to his wife, Karen, that Sadie was a swimmer and could have saved herself. He knew firsthand, because he and Tommy had often taken Sadie fishing. She was an experienced swimmer. Someone had to have her, he told Karen. Walter returned to his brother’s house to see for himself, and he found pawprints on the roof. They had to be Sadie’s, he told anyone who would listen. She was alive, and he was determined to find her. He made fliers, hung them in the neighborhood, and posted listings online with Sadie’s information.
Before he learned Sadie’s fate, however, Walter was killed in a construction accident. He was working in a hurricane-damaged area, helping residents rebuild their homes.
About two months later, while the family was still grieving, Amy answered her phone. Elana Gerson was calling to tell her that Sadie was safe and at Celebration Station.
Karen was convinced that it was her late husband Walter who’d helped Sadie find her way home. To Elana, who’d made that important phone call, “If that’s not a miracle, I don’t know what is.”
Reunions such as this one felt like miracles, given all that the owners and pets had been through. To see them together again was what the animal rescue effort was all about.
“Reunion! Reunion!” rang out across the grounds at Camp Tylertown and, later, Celebration Station each time a pet went home. The banging together of pots and pans—and later the ringing of a cowbell—could be heard across the grounds, letting everyone know that another hurricane victim had been reunited with a pet. For the caregivers who couldn’t leave their posts, it made their day to hear that sound. Reunions were the events volunteers and staffers looked forward to most.
For the pets’ families, they meant even more. Every owner had a story about how they came to lose their pets. Volunteers listened intently as owners arrived, day after day, in search of their pets and retold what they’d been through.
Lee and Sheila Glazier told one such story on September 25, after they drove onto the sanctuary grounds knowing that Diago, their buff-colored Cocker Spaniel, was there. Diago was wearing a rabies tag that had been traced back to the Glaziers. Sheila and Lee had gotten onto the Petfinder Web site, where Diago’s photo and rabies tag information were posted. From that tag, a positive match was made. The next day they drove from Georgia, where they had been evacuated, to Tylertown’s base camp, hoping that their three other dogs might have been saved, too. After they arrived, they walked to Toytown to the small dogs. But only Diago was there. Not finding their other three didn’t dampen their enthusiasm for reuniting with Diago, however. When Diago and the Glaziers saw one another, it was difficult to tell who was happier. Diago’s entire body wagged as he saw his owners for the first time since the storm. He went from one to the other, jumping up. For the Glaziers, get
ting Diago was good enough, they said. To find even one was a relief.
Witnessing a reunion was also good enough for volunteer Barb Davis, a Nebraskan who spent two months in the Gulf region. She volunteered at the Celebration Station triage center. “We came in one night from tracking and trapping. It was close to midnight, and a dog and a cat were being reunited with two different families. That was the only time these people could get there, at midnight.
“It made me want to go out and find more so we could get even more pets reunited with their families. We worked twenty-hour days, and the hope of a reunion was the driving force. It lifted morale.” Buoyed by good feelings from reunions, volunteers started the next day anew, refreshed to find more lost animals.
The reunion process was an integral part of the rescue operation. In the aftermath of the storm, the process at Camp Tylertown began in earnest almost from the moment the base camp was set up. Reunions even became my second job. My first day at camp, I responded to requests from the command center to see if I could physically match up pets from information given by owners to the command center. That first day, I made two matches. The first was Brooklyn, a small red Pomeranian, who was delivered a few weeks later to her foster mom. The second was Kika, a Schnauzer. Lost-and-found workers immediately notified Kika’s person, Mike Pyle, who said, upon seeing Kika the following day, that he had never expected to see his dog again. As more people learned of the rescue center and called the St. Francis Animal Sanctuary or the Best Friends command center in Utah, reunions snowballed.
One of the best ways to make those reunions happen was the daily posting on the Petfinder Web site of each animal who arrived at base camp. Volunteers did most of the data input, a job that had the perk of being indoors, so they could escape from the heat of the day. It was through Petfinder that Claudia and Ernest Seymour found their eleven-year-old dog, Jaque.
They logged on to Petfinder from Houston, where they’d moved, looking for the dog they hadn’t seen in nearly a month. He was taken away from them on the Causeway bridge at Interstate 10. They searched through the hundreds of listings of dogs, one by one. Then they saw him. A photo of their Lhasa Apso mix was posted on Petfinder with a notation that his last known location was in Mississippi at Camp Tylertown. On October 1, the Seymours drove from Houston to Camp Tylertown to retrieve him and have their reunion.
Other evacuees, ones who found their animals on Petfinder or traveled to base camp to look for them, were also successful. Gizmo, a Jack Russell mix, went home to owners Theresa and Henry Schloner. Skiddles, a tabby cat who resembled a skunk, was reunited with his person, Pat Murphy, as was Princess, a Siamese cat, who went home to Cheryl Bradley. A Chow mix named Shorty, a Pit Bull named Sable, and a Siberian Husky called Brie also were returned to their families. They, among hundreds of others, got to go home. For the ones who weren’t reunited, volunteers and animal humane groups from around the country were in the wings, waiting with open arms to give them new homes.
Originally, no grand plan was in place at base camp because the response to Katrina had been so immediate. Before long, procedures were improvised and processes fell into place, especially as a result of Petfinder’s large database of animals and the volunteers who worked tirelessly to make matches. By September 19, twenty-six dogs and cats had been returned to their people. By the end of October, two hundred had been reunited. When the last reunion took place in December 2006, around 15 percent of the pets rescued by Best Friends had been reunited.
It wasn’t an easy job, matching people and pets. After victims were evacuated from New Orleans, they began sending pleas via e-mails and photos, hoping for help finding their pets. Those descriptions were passed on to base camp, where volunteers looked for the animals in dog runs and cat kennels, hoping to make a match. But Camp Tylertown wasn’t the only place animals were taken to. They were also at the handful of other temporary animal shelters in the area; and rescue groups from other states went into the area, rescued dogs and cats from the streets, and took them out of state. As one volunteer at base camp described it, pets were scattered to the four winds. But the workers at Camp Tylertown did their best to make sure each animal picked up was put in the database and listed on Petfinder before he or she went to a foster home.
Pets with rabies tags or microchips were simpler to match, although it became frustrating when phone numbers didn’t work; it took months to get cell phone towers and land-line cables repaired and service restored. As telephone service slowly returned to the city, volunteers redialed the numbers, hoping to reach owners, as in the case of Sadie the yellow Lab. But even then, phone service was poor at best, and it wasn’t uncommon for calls to be dropped several times. (It was no joke when staffers and volunteers, moving a foot or two on the lawn for a better connection, could be heard saying, “Can you hear me now?”)
For the Pomeranian named Brooklyn, after initial contact with her owner was made, the number died and went out of service. No one had Brooklyn’s person’s address.
The Pomeranian was placed in a foster home in the town where her owner had relocated in hopes that her owner would contact the lost-and-found workers again. Information was put on the Internet, and the foster guardian contacted the media to get the word out that Brooklyn was in the city and waiting to be picked up. The ploy worked, and Brooklyn was reunited.
Some animals were matched by chance, and many volunteers, like Elana Gerson, were the heroes. One day in September, a volunteer, during her second trip to Camp Tylertown, was sitting in the small office waiting for the paperwork to be completed for two more foster dogs when she looked up at the dozens of photos of lost pets tacked to the wall. All of a sudden, she blurted out, “Oh, my gosh, I think that’s my foster boy.” The photo was blurry and the dog had since been groomed, but the volunteer was certain it was him. She called a friend, who agreed to go to her home where her boyfriend was watching her pets and drive the dog back to Tylertown, where his person picked up the dog.
Another early reunion was that of Buddy, a brown-marble-colored American Staffordshire Terrier (a relative of the Pit Bull). When she couldn’t locate Buddy after the storm, Buddy’s person, Heather Taylor, sent out two hundred e-mails and fliers with Buddy’s photo to both human and pet rescue groups, the Red Cross, veterinarians, and even pet stores, hoping someone had seen him. She searched feverishly for any word about Buddy, who is her son Allen’s dog. She never gave up hope. “When you have lost everything you own,” she said, “and have little money and means, it is hard. We lost our home, possessions, our car, just like many other people.” Still, she persevered. “This is Heather Taylor and I am one of thousands of people searching for their pets,” her e-mails began.
An e-mail from Heather was received at the command center. Heather’s description of Buddy said that he is “a big friendly baby who responds well to his name.” At that point, we didn’t yet have a printer set up at base camp, so I enlarged the photo of Buddy on my laptop’s monitor and walked outside, with the computer in hand, to Pooch Alley (where most of the Pit Bulls were housed) to see whether I could match a dog to Buddy’s photo. Running Pit Alley that day was volunteer John Hoenemeier. I showed John the fuzzy photo, and together we walked from run to run, searching for a look-alike. We came upon a dark-brown brindled boy. One of the problems was that this dog’s face was cut up and the one in the photo wasn’t. And we weren’t quite sure about the markings. The description was explicit about the shape of the white fur on his chest, but because of the angle of the camera, we weren’t positive. This dog’s run had been moved about five feet away from the next one on the row because he was possessive and he and his neighbor would get into it through the chain link, giving the dog surface cuts and scrapes. Yet John and I were 90 percent sure the dog was Buddy.
I took photos of the dog, went back to the office, and e-mailed a note and photos to Jill Dennis at the command center’s lost-and-found office, letting her know that we had a dog at Camp Tylertown who looked a lot like Buddy.
Because there was a strong possibility it was Buddy, we sent him to Texas with a volunteer.
In the meantime, Heather enlisted help from another rescue group, who went to her house to look for Buddy, but he wasn’t there either. Heather didn’t know about Camp Tylertown and wasn’t aware that Buddy had been safely removed from the house while the water was still standing in the parish. That rescue had happened on September 11, when volunteers Tracey Simmons from Chicago and Ken Ray of Pell City, Alabama, were out in a flat-bottomed jon boat and headed to Paulger Street after they heard a dog barking. A dark-brown Pit Bull was making his way down the street by jumping up on a porch, then back down into the water, and back up onto another porch. He caught Tracey and Ken’s attention, and they motored down the street. They heard a second dog bark from inside one of the houses. They opened the front door, and Buddy waded in the water toward them.
“Buddy was happy to see humans,” Tracey said. “He was ready to be rescued. It was like he was relieved. He didn’t mind the boat ride at all.” But Buddy had to share the boat with the Pit Bull and a cat who were rescued from the same street. “Buddy wanted to go after the Pit,” she said. “That was his only problem. Buddy was very much a people dog, just not a dog-friendly type of dog.” The other dog was trying to jump out of the boat, so Tracey pinned him with her knees while Ken kept Buddy up front with him to prevent any scuffles.
Heather’s then six-year-old son Allen was despondent over losing Buddy. Heather and her two children had been living in San Antonio when the hurricane hit, but Allen was visiting his father in New Orleans at the time. Allen and Buddy were inseparable, so much so that when Allen went to his dad’s for summer vacation, Buddy went with him. Allen’s father, thinking they would be gone only a couple of days, left Buddy inside the house with food and water, not knowing that storm water on some streets in his neighborhood would reach the ceiling. Somehow, Buddy survived by treading water until it dropped to where he could sit on the sofa.