Small bands of rescuers went neighborhood by neighborhood, house to house, peering through windows or listening for the sounds of animals. If they heard or saw signs of life, they’d crawl through a window or force open a door. Somehow, many animals found their way onto rooftops, and rescuers clambered up ladders to reach them. After a room-by-room search, they’d leave large-lettered markings on the front of a damaged house to signal to other rescuers that it had been checked. By the end of the day, the transport vans were full with barking and meowing evacuees—and even the occasional shriek of a parrot or the quieter sounds of rabbits, reptiles, or other small animals stirring in their crates.
For all its distinctiveness, New Orleans was not so different from other cities in terms of pet keeping. Like the rest of the nation, some 70 percent of households had one or more pets. So just playing the odds, it was likely that rescuers would find evidence of pets in two of every three homes—either hustled away with their owners during the evacuation or left behind and alone. Although surveys reveal that our active supporters and members are predominantly white and tilt heavily female and older, the situation in New Orleans reminded us that there is a much larger universe of people who care deeply about animals. Concern and love for animals was spread across every demographic group, and hardly confined to any one class or race.
With their frightened passengers on board, the rescue drivers then headed about an hour inland to Gonzales to deliver them to Lamar-Dixon, where still more volunteers helped to off-load the animals. Volunteers noted the pickup address or location if they could get it, presented the animals to veterinary teams, and then placed them in makeshift stalls. End to end, each barn at Lamar-Dixon was about the length of a football field. One was reserved for horses rescued from outlying parishes, and two were for dogs and cats—with four or five wire kennels placed in each stall. There was no way to easily clean the cages, and this setup was a logistical challenge at every level. The lack of air-conditioning, the drainage and cleaning complications, and the absence of sleeping quarters for staff and volunteers took their toll on everyone, including the animals. When lightning storms struck—and they came often—it was like a fire drill and the volunteers and staff would rush to the community bathrooms, since those were the only protected structures at the site, and huddle inside until the worst had passed.
The biggest logistical hurdle of all was dealing with the cap of two thousand dogs imposed by the owners of the facility—a restriction they didn’t apply to other animals. If three hundred more rescued dogs arrived, then three hundred had to leave, as with the first of the plane flights arranged by Madeleine Pickens. We reached out to shelters and rescue groups and shipped animals by truck around the country—to Florida, Missouri, Ohio, Texas, and even California. These rescue partners agreed to a holding period, to give people time to get their bearings and reunite with their animals. It had turned into a diaspora for the animals and people of New Orleans, and it made reunions much harder to pull off. The HSUS offered to cover the costs of sending people to their animals, or sending animals back home, but the matter of cost was the least of the problems.
AT LAMAR-DIXON, PEOPLE WHO had left animals behind in the rush to get out of town were beginning to return, walking the aisles in search of a friend. Among them was John Wallman, who with his wife was searching for their blind cat. “We left before Katrina, on August 27, figuring it was like all the other evacuations, and we’d be gone for three or four days,” John told my colleague Chad Sisneros moments after finding his cat. “We left her with three weeks’ worth of food and lots of water and took our dog with us. Because she [the cat] is very old and blind, we were afraid of the stress of being caught in traffic. And then we couldn’t come back.
“We finally came back on September twenty-eighth and we were delighted to find on our front door somebody had marked ‘cat rescued.’ This is the first place we came to find her. It feels like a miracle.”
Jeremy Campbell, a man in his late twenties, also showed up at Lamar-Dixon and was reunited with his two cats. “I was out of town working a job before I knew that a hurricane was even in the Gulf. And so it wasn’t even an option for me to come into the city…. And my roommate was there with my pets so they were secure. But the storm hit and it was worse than everybody thought it was, and after about three days, my roommate had to leave.”
Jeremy said his roommate left all the food that they had stored, and water. “I started putting in calls to the Humane Society, frantic calls—please, can you help? And I’ve been a nervous wreck looking for my cats ever since.
“I actually snuck into the city today to get them myself. And when I got there, they weren’t there and I knew I hadn’t been looted because none of my stuff was missing.
“I came here today with a group of three friends who love these cats as much as I do. My parents were like, ‘Go! We know it’s not really safe for you to be in New Orleans right now, but you’ve got to get those cats out of there.’ So I’m so glad that I came here and I found them! You guys were one step ahead.”
These happy endings gave us the encouragement and morale boost we needed to carry on. But for many people, tracking down their pets was a much longer journey, if they found them at all.
That’s how it was for Richard Colar, a forty-six-year-old construction worker who lived right next to a levee in the Ninth Ward. Richard’s home was overtaken by twelve feet of water, and he and his dog, a Siberian husky named Princess, stayed in the attic for three days, just above the water line, until it became unbearable. At that point, Richard actually built a small raft, gathered up Princess, and took his chances floating through the streets.
When authorities found Richard and Princess drifting along, they ordered him to evacuate but without the dog. At that point his only option was to entrust Princess to a neighbor, who himself was soon forced to evacuate. An animal-rescue group happened to be nearby, and that’s how she ended up at Lamar-Dixon, and eventually at a shelter far from New Orleans.
It took a lot of computer searches, but after weeks of separation, Richard—by then resettled in North Carolina—finally reached someone who could lead him to Princess. He called HSUS and spoke to Cory Smith, then our program manager for animal sheltering. “I think Cory was sent to me,” Richard said later. “I’d lost everything. I wasn’t working. I was trying to feel my way in a new place. Princess was all I had.”
Cory and her team eventually traced Princess to the shelter in Ohio. The shelter managers were reluctant to give her up, because she cowered from a man at one point in her stay and triggered suspicions of past abuse. Cory believed that Richard was sincere and had taken good care of the dog. She pressed the issue until the shelter staff relented. A team of drivers volunteered to handle successive legs of the journey, with Cory herself finishing the trip to North Carolina.
“They were kissing each other over and over; it was so sweet,” Cory remembers. “Princess was just so happy to be with him. Every time he sat down for a second she sat on him or curled up inside his arm.” Richard and Princess have since found their way back to New Orleans, where Richard is rebuilding a home that would never have seemed complete without her. “That dog is my child. I know I’m blessed.”
People like Richard refused to give up on their animals, and the animals didn’t give up on them, either. A fellow animal rescuer in Louisiana tells of a poodle mix whose owner was shot in a dispute in the harrowing days after the storm. She had to rescue the shivering, growling companion with a catch pole because the distraught creature wouldn’t leave his owner’s side. It had been five days since the man died, but still the little dog faithfully stood guard.
When I came across this story, it brought to mind a story from the 1920s about a Japanese professor and his faithful Akita. Professor Hidesaburo Ueno would leave his dog, Hachik, home each day, but always returned to find the dog waiting for him at the train station. One day, Professor Ueno never came back—he had suffered a fatal stroke. Friends adopted out H
achik, but he routinely escaped, and they always knew where to look for him: on the platform of the train station. This went on every day until Hachik himself died nearly a decade later. The bond runs that deep, and sometimes it is beyond the power of death or separation to break.
That was the case in perhaps the best-remembered incident involving people and their animals caught up in Katrina. Every tragedy has its iconic moments, and during Katrina it was the story of a little boy and his dog, Snowball, in a scene captured by the Associated Press. The boy and his family had left their home for the Superdome to find safety, but that arena, of course, turned out to be anything but a secure place. When they were then put on a bus to another location, police would not allow Snowball to go with his family. They confiscated the little white dog, ignoring the boy’s pleas. He cried hysterically when they grabbed the dog, and then he vomited, helplessly calling out “Snowball! Snowball!” as they took his pet away.
Here was a boy displaced from the hurricane and clinging with all his might to a beloved companion for comfort. One of the few things he still had was taken away by people who said they were there to help. Everyone saw that this seizure compounded the injury. For the American public, Snowball’s story sealed the case and proved beyond a reasonable doubt that our disaster policies had failed both people and animals.
So much of the havoc and heartbreak we at the HSUS witnessed during Katrina came as a consequence of the failure of government, at every level, to provide for the safety of animals in an emergency situation.
A few animal-protection advocates sought to cast blame on those who left animals behind, and there were certainly a few owners who acted irresponsibly. But generally speaking, that was a misreading of the situation. The government simply had no policies to guide the rescue of animals and offered little or no help to people trying to save their pets. So many people did their best in a crisis situation, and they had to make quick, tough choices—people like Richard Colar who stayed behind until ordered to leave, or like the family of Snowball who were traumatized by heavy-handed and entirely unnecessary government orders.
Basically, the government’s plan presumed that when things got really bad, and citizens had choices to make, they would be willing to leave pets behind without delay or complication—seriously underestimating the power of the human-animal bond. It was a reflexive, bureaucratic mind-set that assumed you could seize or abandon any animal and pay no attention to the whimpers or the tears.
As it turned out, when they were put to the test, most people had more character than that, more loyalty. They weren’t about to turn their backs on dogs, cats, and other animals they considered family. The official policies didn’t just sell the animals short—they sold the people short, and in the process undermined the entire rescue operation. Pet owners across the Gulf region were prepared to leave behind everything they had and cherished—but by God they were not going to forsake their pets.
After seeing these problems firsthand, I vowed that never again would we at HSUS meet a disaster of this magnitude less than fully prepared. And we made it a priority to reform the law so that people in distress would never again be forced to abandon their pets.
We worked with our allies in Congress on legislation to make certain the situation in Louisiana would not be repeated. Instead of hearing rescuers say, “Leave your pets behind,” evacuees should have had the option of saving both themselves and their animals. Their hearts told them that abandoning helpless animals to a horrible fate was the wrong thing to do, and the law should not say otherwise. Transportation should have been available for everyone. At least some evacuation shelters should have had capabilities to house people with their pets, or else co-located shelters for people, so they did not have to be separated.
Through the years, I’ve seen Congress take swift action when there’s a public clamor, and it happened again on this issue. Before our rescue mission in Louisiana had even ended, we drafted, with our top supporters in Congress, the Pet Evacuation and Transportation Standards (PETS) Act—a federal requirement that every local or state disaster response agency receiving funding from FEMA have in place a disaster plan for animals. In this one case, lobbying Congress on this issue didn’t seem all that difficult. Members had watched the drama play out on television and had seen that the broader disaster response was undermined by a failure to account for the needs of pets. We and other animal-protection groups had been trying for two decades to enact such a reform. After Hurricane Katrina, the idea didn’t require much explaining.
On the House floor, Congressman Tom Lantos, a Democrat of California, made the case for the PETS Act this way: “I was watching television one night, Mr. Speaker, and I saw a seven-year-old little boy with his dog. His family lost everything, and all they had left was their dog. And since legislation such as ours was not yet on the statute books, the dog was taken away from this little boy. To watch his face was a singularly revealing and tragic experience.
“Many pieces of legislation we pass in this body are the result of months and years of study and research and preparation. Not this bill. This bill was born the moment the seven-year-old little fellow had to give up his dog because there was no provision to provide shelter for his pet.”
The late congressman Lantos saw the bill through the House, and even lawmakers who had a history of indifference or hostility to animal protection added their enthusiastic support. It passed in fall 2006 by large margins in both chambers and was promptly signed into law by President Bush—who himself had told a reporter that, if faced with a Katrina-like disaster, the first thing he’d grab before fleeing would be his dog, Barney.
Around the same time, some sixteen states also enacted laws to require disaster planning for animals. Out of an awful situation came new awareness, and then new policies, and a new determination to address the problem. Never again would we be so ill equipped. Never again, when it came to disaster preparedness, would animals be completely overlooked and left behind.
The Animals in Our Lives
AMONG ALL THE ANIMALS left behind in New Orleans was a pair of puppies found wandering the streets together. They had been abandoned, and after the rescue they went unclaimed until a New Orleans couple, Paul and Christine Fowler, gave the little dachshunds a new home and new names, Bella and Deiter. Two years later, the Fowlers moved to Port-au-Prince, where Christine, a health worker employed by Tulane University, had been sent to help in the cause of AIDS prevention. Naturally, Bella and Deiter came too, Paul Fowler having made a vow: “I promised them I would never abandon them.”
On the afternoon of January 12, 2010, Paul was in the backyard of their apartment building in Haiti, holding their new baby daughter, Victoria, when suddenly they were thrown into the air by one of the strongest earthquakes ever in the Western Hemisphere. “I was sure we were going to die,” Paul recalled. “It sounded like hell was opening up. I told my baby good-bye.” Somehow the building was left standing and Paul ran upstairs to get the dogs, who were cowering under the bed. It took three days for the family to walk to the U.S. embassy, where they were offered a flight on a C–17 transport plane—but without the dogs. After some fast thinking, Paul dropped them off with a friend who helps run a local orphanage, God’s Littlest Angel. But it tore him up, and as soon as the plane landed in Florida, Christine called the HSUS. As Paul later told a reporter, “I can still see their faces in total confusion as I left. Broke our hearts.”
Within a couple of weeks, our HSUS rescuers had found Bella and Dieter at the orphanage and flew them to Miami, where a joyful reunion awaited them in the arms of the Fowlers. They were in pretty good shape for two dogs who had survived a Category 4 hurricane and then a 7.0-magnitude earthquake. “I left them,” said Paul, “really thinking that I would never see them again—thinking to myself that I had reneged on the promise that I made to the two Katrina puppies, and that was that I would never abandon them.” We were happy to help Paul make good on his word, and with the reunion the family felt whole
again. “It’s like we haven’t missed a day.”
It was an awful lot of trouble to go through, but nobody involved doubts that it was all worth it. Disasters put people in extreme circumstances they never imagined having to face, and they test a lot of qualities, including loyalty—as in the case of these dogs twice left behind and twice saved. And even under the force of two of the greatest natural disasters of our time, the human-animal bond was stretched but did not break.
When it was all over, Katrina proved to be a turning point in our recognition of the human-animal bond, and of the responsibilities that come with it. It was a wake-up moment for America, as the Michael Vick case would be less than two years later. Vick’s offenses revealed a human capacity for cruelty and betrayal worse than we knew; Katrina revealed a bond of loyalty deeper than we knew. In the one case, there was universal condemnation; in the other case, universal affirmation; and in both cases America was moved to action by the same great reservoir of compassion and decency.
In our country and in others, this empathy and respect for animals has been building up over time, even as many forms of animal exploitation have become more severe and widespread. And surely these very cruelties help explain the growing concern for animal protection in our day. The more abusive the conduct, the more apparent the need for reform. The blindness of the cruel only sharpens the vision of those who can see.
In our time, we see animals and learn about them in ways that other generations didn’t. And, at last, we have begun to see them on their own terms. Consider, to take one example, the vast difference in the television programs that give us glimpses of the animal world. Among the most popular shows on Animal Planet in recent years has been Animal Cops, which shows investigators and police confronting cruelty. Today the highest-rated show on the network is Whale Wars, which follows the exploits of the daring crew of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in their pursuit of Japanese whale-hunting ships. Millions of people across the world watch the show, and not many of them are rooting for the whalers. As TV programs go, this is a long way from American Sportsman, which aired on ABC in the 1970s and presented trophy hunters as the stars and lions, elephants, and other animals as mere props for the hunters’ phony heroism. This marks a deep shift in our way of thinking, and especially in the thinking of a new generation. With the exception of the hunting shows on some cable networks, today’s animal shows are generally appreciative and respectful, and the heroes are those who protect animals instead of those who torment and exploit them.
The Bond Page 20