by Cathy Scott
“Annie cried and cried on the phone,” Heidi said. “I told her, ‘Don’t cry. Zoey is fine. She’s happy and living in a run with Buddy.’ He’s going to miss her. They play a lot.”
Zoey had moved in with the Johnsons the year before the storm, after they rescued her from the street. At that time, in addition to having mange, Zoey appeared to have been in a dog-fight. So Annie was especially relieved to hear that Zoey was safe and had survived hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Pam Perez, cofounder of St. Francis with her daughter Heidi, drove Zoey home to Kansas, where the Johnson family had relocated. Zoey has settled in well with Annie’s daughter Emma, their two cats, and their second dog Muppie. “I knew Little Bit was her dog Zoey,” Heidi said.
Zoey wasn’t the only dog left on the streets to fend for herself, out of no fault of her guardian. As the weeks passed and it became clear that thousands of pets—not just stray animals—had survived the storms and were now loose on the streets, a coalition of rescue groups went into a third phase of the rescue operation, which included setting up feeding stations, tracking, and trapping the pets humanely. By then, it was the end of November, and the pets had been without human companionship for three months.
The groups were heeding to what was considered a cry for help coming from the animals still on the streets after being left homeless when the storm swept through the region. Cats sat on porches and sidewalks, waiting. Dogs hid under houses and behind rubble. They migrated to where the food and water sources were, to the neighborhoods where residents were returning to clean up the debris. Animal rescuers, some of whom remained in the area, used traps (crates with a trap door) and poles to catch some of the frightened animals. Once they got to the rescue center, the pets eventually came around and started trusting people again.
An example of a feral-like refugee animal on the streets for months was Munchie, so named because he was a biter. Veteran animal trapper Corolla Fleeger, who spent six months in the Gulf catching animals, described Munchie as one of the toughest dogs she has met, and she has seen it all. An animal control officer in the Algiers community, on the west bank of the Mississippi River in Orleans Parish, caught Munchie, a fluffy red Pomeranian. From there he was taken to a shelter, where workers wrote on his kennel card that he was “very dangerous and will bite.” Also on his paperwork it was noted, “Ill-advised to place this dog with a family.” No one could get near Munchie, not even a vet to examine him. Corolla spent several weeks working with Munchie, sometimes just sitting next to his kennel, until he finally stopped trying to bite her. When she began volunteering, Corolla said she was not adopting a Katrina animal. But with Munchie, it was different. When Corolla left New Orleans in early 2006, she took Munchie to live with her in Southern California. In April 2007, more than a year after he had moved in with her, Munchie’s health gradually deteriorated. He had seizures every few hours and suffered from edema, plus luxating kneecaps so severe that he was unable to walk. Corolla said good-bye, and Munchie passed away in her loving home, not on the streets of New Orleans.
Munchie was an example of how frightened dogs and cats became in the months they spent without people around them. Once Corolla and others started working with lots of patience with animals like Munchie, they began to show progress.
Corolla was one of a track-and-trap team in the field. I followed her around for a day as she set traps and checked on animals she’d been tracking for days and, in some cases, weeks. Then, on January 4, 2006, Clay Myers and I left early in the morning for the Lower Ninth Ward to cover the work of two other volunteer trappers: Craig Hill, a self-employed gutter installer from South Brunswick, New Jersey, and Ann Welling, a student from Cincinnati, Ohio.
Later in the day, we drove to a street near a trap Craig had set in the middle of the night. Inside the trap was a black Pit Bull mix. Just as Craig was getting ready to load the dog into his van, an NBC affiliate, Channel 6 from New Orleans, drove up. They stopped to ask Craig what he was doing. A reporter interviewed him, even though Craig was hesitant and had never been on TV before. At four thirty in the afternoon, the reporter did a stand-up report, which was another vehicle on which animal welfare groups relied to get the word out to locals that people’s pets were still wandering the streets or hiding under houses.
Of all the dogs and cats Craig rescued, only two captured his heart enough for him to adopt. One was a Vizsla mix who was found in a canal with obvious birdshot injuries across the side of her body and head. The prognosis wasn’t good. On top of the shooting injuries, she was so frightened that it took three hours for a team to catch her.
Today, the only reminders of her time in the canal are a few scars. Her X-rays reveal far worse: more than a hundred pellets still imbedded under her skin, some in organs. Twelve remain in her left rear foot alone.
“They pierced every organ in her body but her heart,” said Craig, who, along with nearly a dozen volunteers, rescued the dog he named Kanal Girl. Spray painted inside the canal where she lived with another dog for two months were the words ‘“Kanal Boyz,” probably the name of a street gang. “That’s where she was hanging out, so that’s why I spelled her name that way,” he said. Craig adopted her “because she chose me. She follows me everywhere I go.”
In early November, before Best Friends and Animal Rescue New Orleans set up a temporary triage center at Celebration Station in Metairie, Craig and his fellow rescuers had set out to capture Kanal Girl. “She was terrified,” Craig explained. “She was scared and skinny. It took twelve of us three hours to get her. I jumped in the canal with fencing to block her.” Still, she continued to run the length of the six-mile canal. “We walked three miles to get her. We started to sandwich her in, then she took a turn at the pump station.” When she did that, they surrounded her and blocked her again. Finally, they were able to catch her and take her to a veterinary hospital in Metairie.
Prior to her rescue, she had been spotted by the Louisiana SPCA hanging out at the canal with a Chow who had been picked up earlier. Construction workers tipped off animal rescuers in the area that two dogs had been living in the canal for two months, and a resident regularly left them food.
“I was told the Chow was adopted by a family in New Jersey,” Craig said. “When I get back home, I’m going to get together with them so Kanal Girl and the Chow can see each other again.” Craig remained in New Orleans until March 2006 after vowing to stay “until there aren’t any more animals to pick up.”
Animals weren’t the only ones being picked up from houses. Volunteers sometimes came across unusual situations and had to make decisions on the spot. Such was the case when a team went into a storm-ravaged home to retrieve a cat. The only thing undamaged in the house was a dresser in the master bedroom. On it, unscathed and seemingly untouched, was a velvet-lined leather jewelry box. The volunteer was worried that looters who had been spotted in the area would take it. She searched the house and found a utility bill identifying the owner and walked out of the house with the bill and the case. Fellow rescuers carried the cat out of the house.
When the volunteer returned to base camp, she kept apologizing for taking the case, saying she hadn’t known what to do, but she felt sure the owner would have wanted her to take it for safekeeping. Silva Battista (one of the founders of Best Friends with her husband, Francis, who were managing base camp at the time) took charge of the case, and I was tasked with notifying its owner. After some Internet searching, I reached the owner by phone to tell him that we had recovered not only his cat but also a jewelry case. A week or so later, he arrived at camp to pick up both. He thanked everyone for retrieving not only the family pet, but his wife’s jewelry, too, commenting that heirlooms were in the case.
As time passed, it became more common to see a lone pet living in a neighborhood—or none at all. In Plaquemines Parish, where Susie Duttge (who fosters cats and helps strays near her home in Lake Bluff, Illinois) and photographer Clay Myers went looking for strays, a five-month-old kitten was the
only pet still in the neighborhood. “She’s my beautiful, strong-willed, soft-hearted girl,” Susie said. “She was the only animal that survived in her neighborhood five and a half weeks after the storm.”
Susie walked the abandoned, storm-destroyed neighborhood with Clay in early October. She had a feeling, a sense, that there was life in the neighborhood, even though there were no visible signs. The streets were deathly quiet, but then they heard a weak meow. Susie followed the sound until she came upon the house the meows were coming from. “We had no trap, and I knew I had only one chance to get her without one,” Susie said. They lured the kitten out from under the house with food, and then Susie picked her up.
She sat on Susie’s lap on the drive back to base camp. “When she wrapped her little paw over my finger and pulled it tight to her, that was it,” she said. “I told her I would not leave her. I knew at that moment that I would bring her home with me.”
At home in Illinois, the kitten, now called Nola Vie (Nola, from New Orleans, Louisiana—NO LA—and vie, which means “life” in French) is thriving since the ordeal of weathering a hurricane alone. “My other three cats let her rule the roost,” Susie explained. “They’ve understood there’s something different about her since the day she joined our home.”
Nola Vie has a special talent, Susie said. “I toss these little play mice at her, and it doesn’t matter if she’s in front of me or down a hall in another room, in the dark, she jumps in the air, twists, and catches them. She’ll weave in front of my feet until I throw the mice, one after another, every two seconds. She’s just amazing.”
She also does something that reminds Susie of the day she rescued her. “She’s a very happy cat and still pulls my fingers to her as she did that day in the rescue truck. Every day that goes by, I think how lucky I am to have her.”
While Nola Vie may have touched Susie’s heart, it was a lone goose in St. Bernard Parish that brought Susie to tears. Volunteer Chipa Wolfe, who specializes in wildlife rescues, was with the team that day.
They stood quietly on a damaged corner just before sunset, knowing they needed to leave but still looking around for more animals. Martial law was in effect, and they needed to be out of the area before dark. “We heard the strangest noise come out of the eerie silence,” Susie said. They looked around, and then they spotted her: a goose running toward them from behind her hiding place across the street, next to what remained of a corner market and a gas station.
“She was waddling as fast as she could from the side of the destroyed food mart, honking ‘I hear you. I’m here, and I am alone. Don’t leave me.’
“Chipa spoke so quietly and sweetly to her,” Susie said. “He said, ‘I love you. You deserve to live.’ He carefully placed the net over her, and she didn’t so much as flutter a wing. She just let it happen. That was part of the amazing beauty of that day.”
Chipa picked up the bird in the net and sat her in the back of his covered pickup bed, where he released her beside loose dogs and crated cats they’d rescued earlier.
“The animals all got along,” Susie said. “They knew they had been saved, and at that moment they all were on equal ground.”
Back at camp, Susie couldn’t shake the sight of the bird chasing after them. “I broke down, flooded with tears, in my tent at three in the morning, thinking of her plea and how desperate she was,” Susie said. “It was the most gut-wrenching scene of all of my weeks down there. She truly was symbolic of all the lives we encountered and rescued.”
6
Message in a Bottle
I’M GARY KARCHER, and this is Himie,” begins a letter introducing a New Orleans dog to his potential rescuers. Writing the letter was a leap of faith for Gary, who in his note pleaded with rescuers for the safe return of Himie and also for the return of his mother’s two dogs.
Gary’s action that September day—armed with a pen that barely worked and a scrap of paper—was a clear example of the importance of using some sort of identification on pets, if only a note scrawled on scrap paper. For Himie and his housemates, Pudgy and Precious, the letter worked. Himie, a purebred Rottweiler, resembled every other Rottie who was rescued and taken to Camp Tylertown. Without the note, it’s difficult to guess whether Gary would have been able to locate Himie. But because of the primitive note attached to Himie, the threesome was reunited with their family.
Himie’s story began on a sultry afternoon, on the last Saturday of August 2005, when Gary Karcher sent his eighty-two-year-old mother out of New Orleans. “My mom evacuated with my sister and brother-in-law two days before the storm,” Gary said. “She wanted to stay. I told her not to.”
“What about the dogs?” Ethel Karcher asked her son.
“They’ll be okay,” he told her. “I’ll stay with them.”
And he did. A couple of days later when the levees broke, flooding St. Bernard Parish—one of the hardest-hit areas in New Orleans—water rushed into Gary’s house. Within fifteen minutes, it was above the windows. For a week, he weathered the storm with Himie, along with Pudgy and Precious, his mother’s Dachshunds.
“During the eye of the hurricane, that’s when the water came up,” Gary explained. Before he knew it, the level inside his home had reached four and a half feet. As the storm water rose even higher, he knew they needed to get outside; otherwise they would not make it. “The [windows] broke and the water rushed in even more,” Gary said.
Once it leveled off, Gary called the dogs and “they came swimming to me.” He lifted Precious and Pudgy onto the back of the sofa and commanded Himie to sit on the cushions. Then he tried to push, one by one, the dogs outside through a window, but they kept swimming back inside.
Finally, he grabbed a plastic trash can floating in the house, put Pudgy and Precious inside it, swam through a window opening, and pulled the trash can outside with him. “That trash can was their lifeboat,” Gary said. Once he and the doxies were out of the house, Himie followed. “I put Himie on the roof of my station wagon and told him ‘Stay.’ When I rose up out of the water to push Himie onto the car, the wind blew the trash can, with Pudgy and Precious in it, toward my neighbor’s fence. I followed it. I sat in the water and hung onto the fence with one hand and held the trash can with my other hand.” It took four hours for the violent winds and surging waters to subside. Himie, Gary said, stayed “right there on the station wagon the whole time.”
When the storm finally died down, a neighbor tied out a boat in Gary’s backyard, and Gary coaxed Himie off the car and into the water. Gary waded in the water, still pulling Pudgy and Precious in the trash can, while Himie swam next to him. Then Gary pulled the dogs and his neighbor’s dog, Rocky, onto the boat. “I told my neighbor, Rick, not to untie the boat, because we’d end up in the channel. But we were in the boat about an hour when the wind started to pick up and carry us away,” he said. The two men got out of the boat and made their way to a nearby two-story house on the street behind theirs, pulling the boat beside them, with the dogs still inside. While Gary and Rick climbed through a second-floor window to safety, the dogs waited in the boat. They eventually maneuvered through the house to the first floor, and then waded back to the boat to retrieve the dogs. It took several hours to get everybody settled upstairs.
A day later, sheriff’s deputies approached the house in a rescue boat and told Gary and Rick to get in with them. Gary politely refused, but his neighbor complied. The deputies would not let Rick take Rocky, a Labrador Retriever. “It’s okay. Rocky can stay with me,” Gary assured Rick. For several more days, Gary lived on the second floor with his dogs. At one point, he got back in the water and went home to retrieve Himie’s eye salve from the medicine cabinet. Before the storm, he had been applying it because of an infection in Himie’s left eye. On the way back from his house, deputies stopped Gary and told him again that he needed to get in their boat. He tried to reason with them: “I told them I had dogs I was taking care of. I wouldn’t get in, and they told me they’d come and get me tomorro
w with a gun.”
Gary returned to the dogs and began hunting through the house for something to write with. He found a pen and a dry piece of notebook paper. He wanted to make sure that Himie had information with him, however primitive, that would help him get back home again. Otherwise, Gary knew he might not ever see him or his mother’s dogs again. The following is the text of the letter Gary wrote in hopes his rescuers would read it.
HIMIE he’s a big baby.
Hi I’m Gary Karcher, and this is Himie. He is two years old and has been on heartworm [prevention] meds for two years. He is well trained and loves kids and other dogs, and housed train.
I risked my life to save the three dogs, the other two are wiener dogs and they have been on heartworm med also.
I stayed with them high & dry for a week on a 2nd floor. The water went down to about 1-½ feet. I’ll put all the water that is in the water heater in pans and all the food that is left, and hope they make it. Its like leaving your kids. I hope they stay with each other.
If you find them, please let me know. You can find me at V.A. Hosp.
Karcher, last four digits [of Social Security number] 9128.
P.S. Here is his eye med. Three times a day to clear up.
As Gary wrote the note, the ink in the pen was running out. He had to go over some letters several times for them to be seen. Barely legible, because of the lack of ink, was the information about the hospital. He had planned to include his neighbor’s dog in the message, but the pen ran out of ink.
