by Cathy Scott
Just when she was ready to give up on finding Buddy, Heather got a call from the Best Friends rescue center, saying they’d received her e-mails and photos and wanted her to look at some photos of a dog at base camp who looked like Buddy.
“They e-mailed me photos of the dog they thought was Buddy, and I almost fell out of my chair,” Heather said. She was certain it was he. If not, she said, she’d adopt the look-alike.
In late September 2005, Allen and Buddy were reunited near Houston. Allen looked at Buddy and said, “I thought the hurricane washed you away.” A year later, instead of vacationing in New Orleans again, Allen spent it at home in Texas with Buddy, playing ball and swimming together in their pool. “They’re still inseparable,” Heather said. She was so grateful to have Buddy back that she broke a rule after he returned home: she now lets him sit wherever he likes, including on the furniture.
Many animals, especially the small ones, were moved to foster homes to get them into temporary housing until their families could be found. One day at base camp, I walked over to Toytown looking for a black Poodle named Tia, because the command center was making arrangements to get her back to her person. A match had just been made, however, so Tia had inadvertently been sent with a San Francisco Bay Area group and was, at that moment, in the air on her way to California and about to be placed in a foster home. It took several phone calls by a couple of people to hook up with the folks awaiting the flight in California. They were asked to hold the Poodle at their facility until arrangements could be made to transport her back to her person, who had evacuated to Texas. That was done, and Tia was flown to Texas and reunited with her person on November 1.
Jill and Steve Williams, foster parents to a puppy terrier they named Yoda, flew with him at their expense to his Louisiana home in time for Christmas. They wanted him to be home, but giving him up was bittersweet. “When we got the news that Yoda’s family had been located, he had already been staying with us for a few months,” Jill said. “It may not seem like a long time in retrospect, but when we first started fostering him, he was just a tiny, lonely, whimpering pup. He was only three or four months old at the time, so he was confused and sick and scared. We watched him quickly grow into a fearless, happy, and—most importantly—healthy dog.”
When she got the call that Yoda’s family was looking for “Boss,” his original name, a feeling of panic came over Jill. “I had so many questions: Was this really his family? Would he remember them? Would he be sad to leave us? My tears were quickly brushed aside when I mustered the courage to phone [his family] and talk to them. They were beyond happy to hear from me, and repeatedly thanked us while crying and talking about Boss.”
Their lives, Jill said, had been turned upside down by the storm. “This was the first bright point in weeks for them. It was almost Christmas, and I knew that this would mean the world to them—to have their pup back in time for the holidays. I wanted to be a part of that joy. I wanted to see the smiles on their faces.” Seeing Yoda go home was also a way to bring about closure for Jill’s family. So they flew to New Orleans on December 15. Because Yoda had been such a young puppy, he was shy at first in his original home. But when his housemate, Smokey, a Pomeranian, was returned a short time later, the two immediately remembered each other and haven’t stopped playing since. “This was the best present anyone could ever get,” Jill said.
Not all foster parents, however, willingly gave up the dogs and cats they’d taken in after Hurricane Katrina when the owners surfaced to reclaim them. The prospect of giving up the animals they helped and came to love was a difficult one, and a small percentage of those who took in fosters from Camp Tylertown refused. As a result, in an attempt to get their pets back, roughly twenty Katrina survivors sued humane societies, animal rescue groups, and people who had taken in animals.
With Best Friends, it was just the opposite. The organization stood by the pets and the original guardians and was the plaintiff in lawsuits, in concert with the Louisiana Attorney General’s office, on behalf of the legal and rightful pet owners. In Louisiana, pets are still considered pieces of property. To that end, Best Friends followed the letter of the law.
One of those cases was one of the last reunions facilitated by Best Friends. The suit involved a small dog, a Shih Tzu mix named Little Bit by volunteers. The circumstances surrounding Little Bit being taken from his family were similar to the story of Snowball, a small, fluffy dog removed from the arms of a child by a police officer. No one was ever able to find Snowball or his owners. In fact, the circumstances were almost identical, except for the location. The Associated Press reported that Snowball had been taken away from a crying boy at the Superdome, whereas Little Bit was taken from a crying toddler on the Causeway, about five miles away.
Little Bit’s family punched a hole through the roof of their flooded Mereaux home in St. Bernard Parish and lifted their pets out with them. “We took three dogs and two birds through the roof of our house,” owner Lisa Downs said. They had to leave their cats behind.
A rescuer in a boat allowed the dogs and birds to go with them, but once they arrived at Interstate 10 near the Causeway, they were told by uniformed officers to leave their pets. Lisa and her boyfriend, Robert Carter, tied their two larger dogs, Jordan and Cee-Cee, to a fence on the other side of the river. Jordan, thirteen years old, was too weak to walk, and they had to carry him to the fence. They released the birds.
The family kept Little Bit with them as they stood in line waiting to board the bus with Lisa’s young son, Devin. “I had my son in one arm and Little Bit in the other,” Lisa said. “The bus driver said, ‘You’re not bringing that dirty dog on this bus.’ ”
He told Lisa to let the dog go. Her son pleaded with him to let them keep him. “He cried and said, ‘No, don’t let him go,’” Lisa said. But the driver refused, so Robert walked Little Bit to a nearby field and let him loose.
Little Bit was ultimately rescued and taken to Best Friends’ Camp Tylertown site and eventually placed in foster care. A neighbor looked for the family’s other two dogs and was told they hadn’t made it.
Micci Childers, a worker with Stealth Volunteers—a group that helps people find their pets by combing through hundreds of photos and e-mails to match up identifying information—assisted Lisa in locating Little Bit.
Later, when Lisa’s family returned to their neighborhood to see what they could find, “I spotted one of my cats,” Lisa said. “He survived by hanging around the neighborhood. The other one, Midnight, a neighbor found and took care of.”
Because the home Little Bit was placed in didn’t want to give her up, Best Friends filed a lawsuit in the county where the dog was placed. Due to that move, Little Bit was reunited with her person fifteen months after the storm, also just in time for the holidays.
“I always knew I would see him again,” said Lisa, who started looking for her missing dog almost as soon as she and her family were evacuated. “It’s like a 150-pound weight has been lifted off my back.” Once home again, Little Bit wouldn’t let Lisa out of his sight. “He follows me everywhere,” she said. “He sleeps with me. When he first saw me, he squirmed away from the person who was holding him to get to me, he was so excited.” She said he’s back to normal, wrestling and playing with her son. “It’s such a joy to see them back together and a joy to have at least one of my babies back. It does give us that closure we needed.”
For one East New Orleans woman, getting just one of her dogs back—and knowing that the other was placed in a good home—was good enough for her.
Jackie Jones stayed for two weeks in Orleans Parish near City Park after Katrina hit because she didn’t want to leave her dogs. She had rescued Blackie and Angel two years earlier as starving strays under an overpass in the Ninth Ward, where they had been fending for themselves. She took them home, fattened them up, and had them spayed. She also put them on heartworm prevention. “I stayed because of them,” Jackie said. “I kept thinking, ‘The water will go down
.’ I had about forty gallons of water and bags and bags of dog food. I had keys to my neighbor’s house, and she had canned goods and water. So we stayed on a neighbor’s porch.” But then the water did not go down. “People in boats offered rides,” she continued. “I gave a man a couple dollars to boat us to a service station. We left the neighbor’s porch, and the two dogs and I stayed at the service station for a week. The National Guard came and said we had to leave because we were on private property. They came back a day later and told me it was mandatory, I had one day to leave, and I couldn’t take my dogs. I told them if my dogs drown, I drown, too, because that’s why I stayed. Two weeks after the storm, I had to leave my dogs upstairs at my neighbor’s house.” She left enough food to last two weeks and enough water for five days. She paid the man again for a ride in a boat and was taken to St. Charles Avenue in Carrolton, to a National Guard staging area. The Guard then took her to the Convention Center and, after two days, to the airport in Kenner. She was bused to Alton, Illinois, where she stayed for about six months.
When Jackie returned to New Orleans, she read a newspaper ad about a Best Friends adoption event at Celebration Station in Metairie and later learned while there that her dogs had been rescued and were okay. She also found out that Blackie had been picked up from her neighbor’s porch five days after Jackie evacuated. “She was waiting for me,” Jackie said. “That touched me. She’s a good girl. I missed her.” A volunteer has helped her find both her dogs in a database. Blackie, who was called Olive by volunteers, was reunited with Jackie two weeks later. Her other dog, Angel, was adopted out, and that was fine with Jackie. “Because I know she’s in a home with a family and she’s okay, I’m happy. I got Blackie back, and she’s doing fine. They took care of her the way I did.” Jackie has since relocated to Baton Rouge, where she and Blackie are living with family. “We’re happy here,” Jackie said.
The same weekend Blackie was reunited with Jackie, Leah Purcell, with Spindletop Refuge in Houston, returned an aging Pit Bull named Old Girl to her person. Old Girl had been picked up as a stray by an independent rescuer a month after the storm and taken to Camp Tylertown, where she was treated for a wound in her mouth and an infected eye. In November, Leah fostered Old Girl and drove to her shelter in Texas.
Leah was creative when it came to matching people with their pets. Out of the approximately 400 Pit Bulls and mixes she took out of New Orleans—210 of which were from Best Friends—she reunited more than 25 percent of them, including 40 from Camp Tylertown and Celebration Station. One day, after driving Old Girl to Orleans Parish near City Park to her original owner, Leah and a friend stopped to talk to a resident in a neighborhood where only a few people had returned. Leah had mailed notices to residents and left postcards at their doors, informing them that their dogs were safe. She was looking for an owner on that street because she didn’t have the house number. “We were on the street and saw a man in a truck,” Leah said. “We stopped him to ask if he knew some people who lived in the neighborhood who had a Pit Bull. He said, ‘My two dogs are still missing.’ He had photos in his car. I looked at the photos and said, ‘I have your dogs!’ ” Leah returned the dogs to him a few weeks later on her next trip to New Orleans.
Leah also helped locate owners for Dr. Karen Dashfield, a veterinarian who had put her Newton, New Jersey, veterinary practice on hold to foster Katrina dogs. Leah had gotten a team of volunteers together and had gone door to door putting postcards on houses in neighborhoods where specific dogs were found, letting residents know where the dogs were. So Leah did the same for many of the dogs Karen was fostering. Missy, a temperamental older Chow whose elderly owners had health problems and couldn’t take her back, stayed with Karen for nearly two years until Missy was placed with an animal trainer. “She’ll live the rest of her life with her,” Karen said.
Another rescue group, Out of the Pitts in Kingston, in upstate New York, was so picky about who their American Pit Bull Terriers went to—and was still hoping to reunite them with their original owners—that Rose Norkus, a volunteer with the group, didn’t place the final dogs until two years after Katrina. One was Danielle, a dog Rose described as weighing just thirty-five or forty pounds but “tough as nails.”
“She’s great with human beings,” but not so good with other dogs. She stayed in a foster home until that perfect single-dog home came along. It happened in the fall of 2007 when Danielle went to live with an environmental scientist and her husband near the animal rescue in upstate New York. “They have an all-natural environment and habitat in their backyard,” Rose said. “There’s a little stream and trees, and Danielle thinks when she’s back there that she’s in the woods. It’s a perfect home. They found a restaurant where they can take her out to dinner with them.”
Out of the Pitts also reunited a couple of the dogs long after they’d fostered them. One was a Pit Bull mix called Bonnie at Camp Tylertown, although her real name turned out to be Pepper. The owners of Bonnie wanted her back immediately, but Rose was hesitant. That’s because the owner had arranged for his brother, who lived in New Orleans, to take his dog to a fenced vacant lot, leave her there, and visit daily to give her food and water. “I told him I wasn’t withholding his dog,” Rose said, “but when he was in a situation where she could live with him, we’d return her.” Seven months later, the owner and his two young sons drove to New York from Virginia, where they’d relocated, to pick up Pepper. “She knew him,” Rose said. The two boys, then about eight and thirteen, cried when they saw Pepper for the first time. “It was a big deal,” Rose said. “The media was here to cover it.”
Then, in November 2006, a pet medical center in Virginia informed the group that a car had hit Pepper and her leg needed to be amputated. Without the surgery, she’d have to be put down. The owner told Rose that Pepper had been playing outside with his youngest son when she ran into the street and got hit.
“[The owner] said he couldn’t afford the surgery, and he would give her back to me if only we’d save her life,” Rose said. “That said a lot. He didn’t need to give her back to us.” Out of the Pitts paid the $2,100 surgical cost, and Pepper survived.
Since then, Rose has received regular photos of Pepper playing, now with three legs, in the house with her family. “Everybody’s happy,” Rose said. “It’s clear they love her.”
Some owners were confident they’d find their pets, even though it sometimes took a while. Such was the case with a tortoiseshell cat named Lightning. When Robert Rodriguez and his family located Lightning at Camp Tylertown, he said they had never doubted they’d get her back. She was smart, he said, and that worked in her favor. They had tried to evacuate with her, but they couldn’t find her and had to leave quickly. Still, he said, he knew she’d be okay. And when they walked up to her kennel at base camp and called her name, she started meowing.
For volunteers at base camp, reunions like Lightning’s inspired them to keep going. On the morning of September 12, a special moment took place when New Orleans resident Gallee Grimshaw arrived looking for his cat, ATaonTaCaun. On September 2, Gallee had left his five-year-old cat with Jefferson Parish Animal Control.
A couple of days later, he set out to find ATaonTaCaun. He went from shelter to shelter, but no one could tell him where his cat was. His last hope was when a shelter worker told him about the Best Friends relief center. Gallee got in a rental car and headed for St. Francis. Once there, he walked into the cattery, and it took less than a minute for him to find his cat. He picked ATaonTaCaun up and cried as the cat leaned his head against Gallee’s shoulder. Then, for the first time that day, pots and pans were clanked together and the cry “Reunion! Reunion!” belted out from a bullhorn, alerting workers on the grounds that a cat was being reunited with his person.
When asked afterward where he was headed, Gallee, a model, said he had no place to go because of the flooding in his city. Then he said he wanted to help and asked if he could stay on at Camp Tylertown to volunteer. “Absolutely,” he was
told. Because Gallee was trained at handling Rottweilers, Sherry Woodard enlisted his help at Pit Alley, caring for the Pit Bulls, Mastiffs, Great Danes, Rotties, and other large dogs housed there.
When a couple arrived at the Tylertown base camp one night to retrieve BayBay, an English Cocker Spaniel who had survived nearly a month in a backyard storage shed, the reunion lifted everyone’s spirits. BayBay was reunited with Connie and Dwight Fitch of Gentilly a week after her rescue.
The triage center was full, so BayBay, along with a handful of other dogs, had recuperated in a large kennel in the office at Tylertown. When I didn’t go into the field or wasn’t walking the grounds at the rescue center looking for matches of cats and dogs from e-mails and photos, that office was where I wrote at my laptop. It’s also where I slept each night, in a sleeping bag on the floor, after spending the first week sleeping on the porch and in the laundry room. Because of that, I was with BayBay just about twenty-four hours a day the week after her rescue. She was one sick girl.
Before evacuating, Dwight Fitch had stacked concrete blocks and wood to make a staircase from the ground to the ceiling of the shed in case the area flooded. He put dog food on the steps for BayBay. Then he and his wife, Connie, evacuated. “I still don’t know how she survived in that storage shed,” Connie said. “It had at least five feet of water in it.”
When BayBay was rescued from the shed, a local police officer on the street, who knew the Fitches, handed her over to Cliff Deutsch, a sergeant at the time with a Florida sheriff’s department who was out rescuing that day. The local officer also gave Cliff the Fitches’ cell phone number. The Fitches were called as soon as BayBay was driven to base camp. Seven days later, the Fitches drove in from Arkansas, where they’d evacuated to.