Pawprints of Katrina

by Cathy Scott

  If people couldn’t be on the ground, they helped in other ways. “There were animal welfare and rescue organizations from cities around the country that sent supplies—depleting their own resources—in order to meet our urgent needs,” Anne said. “They were delivered by their own volunteers, who stayed and helped. Along with other valuable items, they would lend us their spay-and-neuter mobile units and donate endless amounts of medical supplies.” The individuals and organizations “never looked for any recognition,” she said. “They were truly responding from their hearts. Volunteers and staff immersed themselves totally in whatever they were doing, owning their job with a fierceness.”

  And everyone worked together. “The bonds built out of respect and appreciation between people from such diverse backgrounds are forever with all of us,” Anne said. “I will always be immensely thankful to all the organizations and individuals who gave so enormously from their hearts and saved so many lives. They are in my heart forever.”

  One of those groups was the Colorado Humane Society. Volunteers with the group arrived early in the rescue effort in a large cargo van that was equipped with built-in kennels, and they allowed a team to drive it into New Orleans each day to transport those rescued back to camp. The large transport van—which was in pretty good shape when it arrived—was an integral part of the daily rescues. It didn’t take long, however, for the gray-and-black sludge and, later, toxic clay to coat the floor—and everything else inside and out. As a result, volunteers started referring to the van as “the Big Nasty.” The name stuck, and before long, that was what the van was officially called. A caravan of trucks and a smaller van, with the Big Nasty usually in the middle, would leave each morning with empty crates and then return to base camp each night with a full load of anywhere from forty to eighty animals.

  The next morning, dogs were examined by vets and then vaccinated, bathed, groomed, and placed in ten-by-ten grassy runs. Injured and sick animals were carried to a triage center set up in a bungalow with a tacked-on cardboard sign that read “M*A*S*H Unit.” Cats were placed in kennels lined with baby blankets in a cattery called the TLC Cat Club or in a converted milking barn dubbed the Cat Barn. In the cattery, some of the felines roamed free, interacting with both volunteers and one another. Two of the walls were screened in, making it a partial patio so they could get fresh air and exercise.

  Some dogs were walked into Pit Alley (which was later renamed Pooch Alley), where the Pit Bulls and Pit Bull mixes lived. Down the road from there, at the far end of camp, was the Back Forty for the larger dogs, like Mastiffs, Chows, Great Danes, Labs, and Rottweilers. Across from Pit Alley was the Romper Room (sometimes called the Bowery) for medium-sized dogs such as Beagles, hounds, and many of the mutts. Another area of runs, called Midtown, was for mama dogs and their pups. The smallest of the dogs, mostly Poodles, Chihuahuas, Pomeranians, Yorkshire Terriers, and Dachshunds of fifteen pounds and under, were housed in an area named Toytown (also referred to as Toy Story or Toyland). A watchman at the front gate of the forty-eight-acre property sat under a tarp at a table called the Kool-Aid Stand.

  Next to Toytown was a cooling station for the small dogs. The larger dogs all had kiddy pools in their runs, plus caregivers sprayed down the dogs a couple of times a day to lower their temperatures in those hot late-summer days. Volunteers kept busy watching over the toy dogs to make sure they didn’t overheat. Donated fans were also set up outside and aimed at the runs. The dogs who showed signs of too much heat were put in the bottom half of a plastic crate filled with a few inches of water to cool them down.

  When people reuniting with their pets arrived at base camp and did not have basic supplies for their animals, volunteers would send them home with armloads of food and water bowls, kibble, leashes, shampoo, toothpaste, and whatever else they needed.

  In one case, a seventeen-year-old who was with his mother walked barefoot onto the base camp grounds. Kit Boggio, a volunteer coordinator, asked where his shoes were. “I lost them in the water,” he said. She asked what size he wore and then hurried over to one of the eighteen-wheelers loaded with supplies. She returned with a pair of size-eleven tennis shoes. “We can’t accept these,” his mother said.

  “Yes, you can,” I told the teen’s mother. “They’re a gift. America sent them.”

  America sent a lot—hundreds of boxes with tens of thousands of various supplies to help run the center. “Generous people from all over the country keep sending supplies for animals and people,” said Faith Maloney, a Best Friends founder, after she visited base camp.

  While everyone believed the public would be generous, the donations that poured in were overwhelmingly so. Leigh and Terry Breland, who live in Terry, Mississippi, fifteen miles southwest of Jackson, volunteered the use of their two-car garage as a central receiving spot for supplies. It wasn’t until the eighteen-wheeler trucks began rolling down their driveway on rural Misty Lane, with its expansive lawns and ponds, that the Brelands realized just how generous Americans could be. They became instant warehouse supervisors as they took in and disbursed supplies.

  “The day after a notice went up on the Best Friends Web site, we got a few boxes,” Leigh said. “We thought that was going to be it . . . that we’d get some boxes in. Two days later, the trucks started coming, and they kept coming in. The people who sent supplies also sent letters and pictures. My mom [Joy Woods] made two scrapbooks of the letters. The outpouring of love and compassion from the country—from a little old lady who sent a collar from her deceased dog to children who sent a roll of paper towels with a drawing and a note—was unbelievable. It was emotional reading them. I’m still thankful for the opportunity. It changed our lives. It made us more focused on people, to be more kind and compassionate to those who can’t help themselves, and to be more aware of people’s feelings.”

  Back at Camp Tylertown, the rescue effort was just as intense. Donors had also shipped supplies there, and boxes were stacked before workers had a chance to go through them. Dog and cat food was placed in an open truck container for easy access.

  Next to a mess hall area—where a tent was later erected—were rows of shelving in an L shape, loaded with donated supplies. It was Best Friends founder and director Francis Battista, during his stint as base camp manager, who organized volunteers to empty and inventory hundreds of boxes loaded with donated supplies. The end result was what everyone referred to as the Dollar Store, because it was for volunteers to grab for free whatever they needed, including shampoo, toothbrushes, bath soap, razors, batteries, flashlights, gloves, towels, and blankets—all items sent to the center by generous people throughout the nation. Separate shelving, in an area next to the Dollar Store, was set up for donated pet supplies, including leashes, collars, harnesses, food bowls, bedding, toys, T-shirts, and sweaters (which came in handy for the dogs in mid-October, as the weather cooled).

  In addition, accommodations were there not only for Best Friends staffers but also for volunteers. Behind Ellis Island were three new temporary fiberglass showers, complete with hot water and tarps that substituted as shower curtains, built by photographer Clay Myers, Best Friends employee Andrew Ireland, and volunteer Doug Klein, a contractor from St. Louis. Across from the showers was a row of seven portable toilets that were emptied every day by a maintenance company. It was indeed a mini-city, albeit in a rustic environment, with all the necessary amenities for pets and people. Volunteers worked tirelessly from dawn to dusk feeding, watering, walking, and medically treating roughly four hundred dogs and two hundred fifty cats on any given day. But at the end of the day, volunteers could take hot showers.

  Sherry Woodard, an animal expert who arrived at Camp Tylertown on the night of September 11, didn’t know what she’d be waking up to the next day. “As the sun came up in the morning,” she said, “I started looking around at all the animals, roughly two hundred fifty dogs and two hundred fifty cats. I’ve met all types of animals—lizards, snakes, ducks, pigs—but just in sheer numbers, it was extr
eme.”

  As kennel manager at the site, Sherry oversaw animal care. The first thing she did was separate the boys from the girls, and then, as she said, “figured out how to get all the animals in the shade.”

  She gathered up tarps, put in a request via the Internet for more, and had volunteers begin tying the blue plastic-covered canvas tarps along the sunniest sides and over the tops of each ten-by-ten dog run. Once finished, the runs ended up looking similar to the FEMA blue-roofed buildings seen throughout New Orleans—a temporary fix for the damage.

  During the week of September 21, kiddy pools arrived for the dogs to cool down and splash in. “The dogs are having a blast,” one volunteer commented as she watched them play. In the late afternoons, the dogs seemed to get their second wind. This is the time of day that photographers call the “golden hour” or the “gloaming,” when the lighting is perfect. Cinematographers refer to it as the “magic hour,” when life feels momentarily suspended in time. It is the hour just before sunset, between twilight and dusk, when the world is golden with light and shadows. At camp, that was when the animals came to life, when they tossed their toys in the air, chased each other, and wrestled. Dogs and cats awakened from their afternoon naps just before the sun began to set, when the air was cooler, and all they wanted to do was play. It was the gloaming of Tylertown. This rural, grassy, wooded property was operating in emergency mode. Yet there were short but memorable breaks from the frenzy during the late-afternoon hour.

  At the end of the daytime shift, just before dinner, caregivers were relieved from their daily chores of feeding, watering, poop-scooping, and running dogs to and from the triage area. During this brief downtime, they often joined the canines in their runs to play ball or simply sit and watch them enjoy themselves. During one afternoon walk around the grounds, I saw a large run filled with Beagles become a playground of activity, with the dogs wrestling in the grass and jumping on top of hay bales left for them to play on. They also played hide-and-seek behind the haystack. On one particular day, in nearby Pooch Alley, a Pit Bull jumped around and splashed in a kiddy pool, not minding that she was in a run by herself. That same day in Toytown, two small terrier mixes wrestled on the grass, rolling around as one.

  Although no rescue group was perfect in the chaos left in Katrina’s wake, Best Friends appeared to be the only organization that kept track of the animals through a paper trail that enabled them to be traced. By the end of the second week, the system was in place and the movement of the animals could be followed. Katherine Glover and her husband, Rob Robison, had set up a similar system during Hurricane Andrew for another animal welfare group. This time they chose to volunteer their assistance at Camp Tylertown because, as Katherine said, “We liked Best Friends’ emphasis on reuniting animals with their owners, which is not always the case with other animal groups.”

  It’s a system that, when implemented, is foolproof. Each animal arriving at the center is assigned an ID number, which is etched on an aluminum tag and attached to the collar. Admissions photos are taken and uploaded to a database and to the Petfinder Web site; a copy is attached to the medical and admissions sheets. One copy of the paperwork is kept with the animals, following them wherever they go, whether it is to a different run or to a foster home.

  Included in the paperwork were existing and new microchip numbers, because all dogs and cats at Camp Tylertown were injected with a microchip. Although the chips didn’t help the pets during the Katrina disaster, they will make it easier to get animals home the next time. The chips, injected between the shoulder blades, contain individual identification numbers that are readable with an electronic scanner.

  Dan Knox, with AVID microchip company based in California, traveled to shelters in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas to inject animals and teach caregivers how to safely implant chips. A few days earlier, he’d been in the Belle Chasse area of New Orleans. “We talked to a veterinarian there,” Dan said. “But we couldn’t even get in,” due to the flooding. That vet was housing two hundred animals. “We had to send chips to a nearby town, and the National Guard transported the chips for us.”

  Microchipping, Dan said, is a major key to getting pets home if they’re lost again. With that in mind, on September 20, along with animal expert Sherry Woodard and a couple of volunteers, Dan organized a mobile microchip cart and went from kennel to kennel microchipping the pets at the Tylertown base camp. “Our goal is to get every pet here microchipped and scanned,” Dan said at the time. The day before, with an electronic device that reads chips, the team scanned 50 percent of the pets to see whether any were already chipped.

  Most of the canines, he said, “are friendly, tail-wagging dogs and were obviously well loved.” And they’ll now have microchips to help get them home.

  Despite the paper trail and microchips, occasional accidents happened, but none that couldn’t be rectified. In late October 2005, a month and a half after Best Friends’ emergency base camp was erected, several rumors began circulating on blogs and in e-mails that people involved in local dogfighting rings were stealing Pit Bulls from Camp Tylertown. Best Friends, in turn, issued a notice on its Web site addressing the rumors. While no Pit Bulls were stolen, the posting did mention that two dogs were missing: one was loose on the St. Francis Sanctuary grounds (and later retrieved) and the other taken by an overzealous volunteer who, on the premise that he was taking her for a walk, actually took her home. In the latter case, a whistleblower, after reading about the missing six-pound Chihuahua, called Camp Tylertown to tell workers where Ginger was and who she was with. The good Samaritan had met Ginger a few days earlier and had asked the volunteer if he’d adopted her from Camp Tylertown, because she knew he’d been there. “They’ll never miss her” was his response. She knew then that the Chihuahua had been taken without permission, and she notified Camp Tylertown.

  Ginger was, in fact, very much missed. When a volunteer working in Toytown that morning realized the man had not returned Ginger, she alerted the kennel manager. Word spread, and it sent a wave of sadness across the camp, knowing that a tiny, shy Katrina refugee, who had already been through so much, was gone. No one knew then whether the man who took her wanted to breed her or simply give her a home. As it turned out, it was the latter, but volunteers didn’t know that for weeks.

  Once he was contacted and asked to return the dog, he willingly drove Ginger back to the rescue center, six weeks after she was removed. Ginger was in good shape and appeared happy and well cared for. The person she’d been living with delivered her with her favorite treats, a sweater, a harness, and a matching leash and collar. After he left the office, Ginger wouldn’t take her eyes off the door, waiting for him to return. A manager at Camp Tylertown was asked if maybe Ginger could stay with the man and his wife. “We can’t reward bad behavior,” the manager said. Ginger quickly bounced back. By the next morning, she was back to herself, playing with two other little ones in the office during the day and sleeping on the floor with me at night.

  Then, on October 29, the TEARS Animal Rescue group of Birmingham, Alabama, volunteering at Camp Tylertown, fostered Ginger and drove her to Pam and Gene Smith, who were eagerly awaiting the arrival of the transport van that evening, thinking they’d be fostering a large dog. Instead, they took home Ginger. Because Ginger had been abandoned three weeks before the storm in the front yard of a vacant trailer with twenty other dogs (the same yard as my Chihuahua foster, Lois Lane), the Smiths were allowed to adopt her. “She now has her own little-size toys, brings them from her bed to the den, and puts them on her blanket on the couch,” Pam said. The family’s other dog, a mutt named Roxy, “has always been a big toy lover, shaking them and playing catch with them. Now Ginger does the same. It’s so funny to see a six-pound dog shake some of those bigger toys.”

  After Ginger was taken, Sherry Woodard, with a group of volunteers she’d enlisted, moved the runs for the small dogs at Camp Tylertown to an area directly in front of St. Francis’s main building to make sur
e that no other little ones disappeared.

  While Ginger may have been one of the smallest canines at Camp Tylertown, the tiniest dog to pass through the gates was another Chihuahua, this one an aging female weighing just two and a half pounds. Her name was Itty Bitty, a snarling, growling, barking girl with only a few teeth—and she knew how to use them. Itty Bitty, who appeared to bite out of fear, arrived with an eye infection, a balding coat, and the saddest look on her tiny face.

  After a week in the office, however, she perked up and nonstop barking began. She was so snappy sometimes that she would let only a couple of people put a collar and leash on her in preparation for her walks outside. If they weren’t quick enough, she’d grab a finger with her two remaining front teeth, bite down, and hang on. Once Itty Bitty warmed up to people, she was fine and liked to be held, but if anyone went near her when she was on someone else’s lap, she would snap at them.

  For some reason that no one ever figured out, Itty Bitty particularly disliked Jeff Popowich, a vet tech, even though she had not spent a significant amount of time with him. If he was anywhere nearby when she was carried or walked, she morphed into a lunging, snapping creature from the netherworld who could be heard all around the yard. Once, Jeff walked over to her when she was in that mode and, with palm down, offered her his hand. She quickly grabbed a finger and bit down, and Jeff stood there without wincing—even though, as she hung on, it had to hurt. (I know, because she had also bitten me.) After a minute, when she didn’t get a reaction from him, she let go.

  Shirley Swift Vogel, a volunteer from Jackson, Maine, saw past Itty Bitty’s tough exterior. On day seven of Shirley’s stint, she spent half of it with Itty Bitty and said this dog was her favorite pet at Camp Tylertown. “When that little teacup was in my arms, I just held her,” Shirley said. “As small as she is, she survived.” But Shirley had other dogs at home and couldn’t foster her. Itty Bitty’s original person was never found, and because she was a difficult placement with her aggressive ways and could have been euthanized if placed in the wrong hands, it was decided she would have a better chance at getting an understanding guardian through the Best Friends sanctuary in Kanab, Utah, where a quieter atmosphere might also help calm her. Itty Bitty, however, had gotten quite a reputation at Camp Tylertown, and it was not easy to find a volunteer heading west who was willing to deliver her to Utah. Eventually, an employee leaving for the sanctuary agreed. So on October 9 everyone said goodbye, and Itty Bitty left for Utah. While she was being vaccinated and having a microchip injected, I held her. Itty Bitty was so humbled by the whole experience that she rested her head, for the first time, on my shoulder, and I hugged her back. It showed us all that, despite the drama, she had a sweet side.