by Cathy Scott
Barbara also didn’t know that a problem with the Petfinder listing—an error that listed Prince as a Poodle instead of a Cocker Spaniel—was the reason she couldn’t locate him among the thousands of online dog listings. Melanie feared that Prince’s family was not going to be able to find him, so she contacted the group who gave him to her and sent an e-mail that she believed was addressed to Petfinder. Instead, it went to the Stealth Volunteers, a group that helps match lost animals with their people. It was Melanie’s e-mail sent to the wrong person that ultimately led Barbara to Prince, because a Stealth Volunteer held onto that e-mail.
Melanie knew as soon as she fostered Prince, beginning on October 19, 2005, that he had been in someone’s home and had been loved, which was why she was persistent in making sure information about the dog was accurate on Petfinder. When he was rescued, it appeared that the buff-colored Cocker Spaniel had been recently groomed, plus he jumped up on the sofa to sleep—both indicators he had been cared for and was someone’s indoor pet.
When my story about Barbara’s search for Prince ran on the Best Friends Web site, Stealth Volunteers, including Robin Siegel and Carla Jennings, recalled Melanie’s e-mail, which they still had in their computer archives. Robin quickly sent an e-mail to Best Friends saying she thought she knew where Prince was living, based on Melanie’s earlier e-mail, and starting the process of getting Prince back home. Melanie was contacted and sent Barbara recent photos, and Barbara positively identified the dog as Prince.
Learning that Prince had been rescued “was the best news I’ve had since this whole thing happened,” said Barbara. “So many people here need encouragement. They don’t know whether their friends and family are living or not. I’ve been talking about Prince so much to the church. If I could just find him, that would help put things back together again. I thank God he had an angel looking over him.”
For Cheesecake, it wasn’t as simple as just going home. Prince had adjusted well first to his foster home and then to his original home. But Cheesecake was a frightened and sometimes possessive Pit Bull mix, and it took months for her to finally settle into life in her new home.
Life in the aftermath of Katrina wasn’t easy for Cheesecake. She was found hiding in front of a house behind a large bush. Jill Garcia and her extended family—all nine of them—discovered Cheesecake shortly after they returned to their home in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans. That was forty-five days after the storm. Jill was outside when her own dog started barking, so she walked closer to her. Something moved.
Thinking it was a raccoon, Jill called out to a neighbor to walk across her yard with her. Then a dog ran out from behind a bush in a yard across the street and jumped over a high fence into the next yard, and then into yet another yard. It looked to Jill as if the dog had taken off and was gone. The next day, however, the dog walked into the middle of the cul-de-sac and stood there, looking at Jill. Jill threw her a treat, and the stray took off again.
She left out food and water, and gradually Cheesecake became braver and began warming up to the family. On the fourth day, the Garcias opened their front door, and Cheesecake ran inside.
Jill’s family named the shy dog Spook, partly because they first discovered her the day before Halloween and also because she was so skittish. But she was becoming possessive of Jill and started to growl at the other dog in the house. Additionally, she was territorial, especially toward the mail carrier.
Jill posted fliers in her neighborhood and knocked on doors, hoping to find the dog’s owner, but no one had seen her before. Because Jill’s household was large and the dog was having a difficult time adjusting, she took her to Celebration Station, the Best Friends temporary triage center where she was eventually adopted out.
No longer named Spook, Cheesecake currently is living with the Smith family in Prattville, Alabama. Rob and Kim Smith adopted her in February 2006.
Lucky for Cheesecake, the family was patient with her lingering skittishness after they took her home. Rob and Kim were determined to make it work, especially because their three children adored Cheesecake, naming her that because her coloring reminded them of the dessert. At first, Cheesecake was territorial with their Dachshund, Seymour. She showed her teeth to him when he went near family members she was playing with. With time, as Cheesecake became more attached to Seymour, that behavior disappeared.
The dogs are now the best of friends, sleeping together and playing nonstop. While the family has a seven-foot fence around the property, so far Cheesecake has not shown any desire to jump it and run away. Like so many other Katrina dogs and cats, she appears grateful and seems to know a good thing when she sees it.
Many other pets like Cheesecake went into new homes instead of being reunited with their original people. Their paperwork and photos filled volumes of binders at Camp Tylertown. Thumbing through the sheets of paper, it was difficult to not wonder where their families had gone. We now know that many neighborhoods were so decimated that their owners didn’t make it out, or they were evacuated to Arkansas, Texas, and even Utah, never to return to their hometown of New Orleans.
For Cyrus Mejia, resident artist and one of the founders of the Best Friends sanctuary, seeing the voluminous paperwork at Camp Tylertown triggered his idea for an ambitious piece of artwork.
“All the animals that came through Best Friends’ rescue center were photographed and documented with one of these forms,” Cyrus said. He said to himself, I’m going to turn them into art. And he did.
On August 29, 2007, on the second anniversary of the day Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast, the finished art project—a boat called Ark—was unveiled to a crowd that had volunteered to help the stranded animals in the aftermath of the storm. I was there for the unveiling. The sound of water lapping against a shore played on a CD as attendees walked around the suspended Ark, recognizing photos of fellow volunteers and the pets they helped at both Camp Tylertown and the Celebration Station triage center. It was cathartic seeing the intake papers as part of the boat’s surface instead of in binders. My Katrina foster dog, Mia, was included.
Cyrus and his wife, Anne, also a founder at Best Friends, ran the hurricane command center from the Utah sanctuary. During November 2005, however, they served as base camp managers at Tylertown, and that’s when Cyrus first saw the animal admission forms. “Having lived there I’m sure added a dimension to the emotion involved,” he said. “My mom was born and raised a few miles outside of Tylertown. I still have family in the area; I have cousins who lost their homes.”
Before he started the project, however, it took a year for Cyrus to digest the devastation left in Katrina’s wake. It was a period of mourning in a sense for a man who was born in New Orleans and spent much of his youth in Louisiana and Mississippi.
He explained that his purpose with Ark was to capture the fear, sadness, grief, and relief experienced by rescue teams in boats, the hundreds of volunteers on the ground, and the animals they saved through nearly nine months of work in post-Katrina New Orleans. He invited many of the volunteers who helped rescue and care for the displaced pets to send in their personal photographs. Those photos were included as part of the collage.
Ark began with a stretched canvas over a wood frame, which is a replica of the flat-bottomed jon boats used in the water rescues in the first fifteen days following Hurricane Katrina. Cyrus covered the surface with hundreds of copies of admission forms used to record information about rescued pets. He glued photographs of both rescued animals and volunteers onto the boat’s surface, along with pet food and kitty litter bags cut into the shapes of dogs and cats. The bottom of the jon boat is covered with maps of the flood-ravaged areas of New Orleans, similar to the maps used by rescuers as they made their way through the flooded streets. Also included in the collage are satellite maps of the storm itself. A mirror under the installation makes the underbelly of the boat easy for viewers to see.
Cyrus finished off Ark by painting the eye of a hurricane swirling througho
ut the surface of the boat. The work was then covered in varnish.
The finished piece, he said, is a labor of love. “I think it’s possible for physical items to retain emotion,” Cyrus said. “I wanted to capture that energy and presence in this work.”
The piece commemorates the heroic work performed by hundreds of volunteers and Best Friends staffers who “answered the call, put their lives on hold, and went to save the animals lost in Katrina’s wake.”
With his artwork, he often returns “to the notion that physical objects can . . . trigger forgotten feelings.” That’s how he felt about the paperwork for each rescued animal.
For Cyrus, the purpose of Ark was not only as a work of art; the collage-covered boat was also meant as a vehicle, a symbol of healing and moving on.
Katrina’s impact on the people of the Gulf Coast was traumatic. The storm’s impact on pets continued for months; in some cases, for a year or more. Animal lovers across the nation offered their support through donations of food and supplies. Despite limited resources, despite being separated from their families and pets for months, and despite facing obstacle upon obstacle, the people of New Orleans who returned to their homes were determined to rebuild their city.
Residents continue to pick up the pieces, putting their houses and their lives back together. While there was little help from local, state, and federal governments, Americans showed up in droves ready to help their fellow citizens, and animal rescue groups rushed to the area to rescue pets and keep them safe until they could return to the Big Easy. Despite the generosity of many people, though, some pets are still waiting to go home.
Katrina also changed people’s values. Instead of material things, most of which were lost in the rubble of the storm, what was important to many were their family members and their pets. That mantra was repeated daily at animal rescue centers: If only I can find my cat, I’ll be okay.
It was the same for Barbara Seales: If I can get Prince back, it will help my family recover. Prince was returned in time for Barbara’s birthday and for Christmas 2005. She’d lost her daughter-in-law and her fifteen-year-old grandson in the storm. Their bodies were found twenty yards from each other on Thanksgiving 2005. Prince’s return was something for the Seales family to celebrate. “The grandkids are enjoying Prince and Princess,” Barbara said. “We know how lucky we are to have Prince home.”
20
Lessons Learned
AFTER THE BREACH OF THE LEVEES separating the lower Mississippi River from the below-sea-level bowl of New Orleans, days turned into weeks and the pets of Katrina were forced to fend for themselves in the aftermath of the flooding. Then, in late September, Hurricane Rita hit the region, leaving some neighborhoods underwater for seven more days and stranding even more pets. Many animals were left on streets, inside homes, in yards behind fences with no way to escape, and in garages, sheds, attics, apartments, and offices.
Those on the ground in the Gulf Coast region, as well as refugees who fled the area, learned the hard way that people don’t want to evacuate without their pets. When Katrina and Rita hit, many did so under duress.
Still, the pets’ spirits soared above the rising floodwaters, and the hope of once again seeing their people kept them alive against terrible odds. Despite those odds, thousands braved the storms and survived. The pets lived not only without food or water but also without the companionship and care of their guardians. For the first time, the mainstream media covered that extraordinary bond between people and their pets. Haunting images flooded the airwaves: stranded humans and animals wandered aimlessly with no food or water.
Because of those images, people from across the United States and Canada arrived in droves to save the animals from the murky standing water and, later, the muck-covered streets. Then extraordinary efforts were made to reunite them with their families. More still, however, were never rescued, or the groups that did rescue them didn’t have the means or the paperwork to track them, so those animals were never reunited with their people.
As a result, Hurricane Katrina was a wake-up call with a resounding message: along with people, pets also need to be protected during a disaster. What came out of the televised images, as the world watched in horror, was the vow never to let it be repeated. Katrina proved that people need to be prepared, from individuals putting identifying tags on their pets’ collars or microchipping them to cat owners keeping crates on hand to government officials at all levels mandating provisions for not only humans but their pets.
Since Hurricane Katrina, state and federal legislation has been passed that requires animal shelters to be included in government disaster plans. On the national level, in a groundbreaking federal bill, leaving pets behind and thereby separating them from their humans is now unacceptable. With the sweep of a pen, Congress put the nation one step closer to protecting the health and well-being of pets in future disasters.
A congressional caucus is doing its part, as well. On September 20, 2005, Michael Mountain, president of Best Friends, met in Washington, D.C., with a group of lawmakers who make up the bipartisan Congressional Caucus for Animals. Members of the caucus asked major rescue organizations, including Best Friends, to let them know how the overall Katrina animal rescue was going—which Best Friends and the others were, at that moment, entrenched in—how interactions with the federal government were working, and how things could work better in future emergencies. The request was a positive sign that Congress was paying attention.
Of those pets reluctantly abandoned during Katrina, Best Friends rescued about 7,000, reuniting more than 15 percent. Together, all the animal groups and individuals in the area rescued roughly 20,000 animals from an estimated 100,000 to 250,000 left stranded in the New Orleans area.
Doing its part to create a solution, the next year Best Friends invited volunteers from a variety of organizations to join in a three-day roundtable discussion to help plan for the next catastrophe. At the opening meeting, Paul Berry, now CEO of Best Friends, emphasized that disasters aren’t isolated to hurricanes. Disasters also include mudslides, tornadoes, wildfires, earthquakes, tsunamis, and whatever else comes along. The plan, he said, is to get disaster response right over time. Participants broke into discussion groups of five to ten people to develop strategies, tactics, and protocols to best respond in the future. In the end, each group came up with comprehensive ideas, vision statements, and outlines, all in preparation for the next big one.
The roundtable discussions were a precursor to the 2007 hands-on, four-day, outdoor rapid-response training session in Angel Canyon on the Best Friends sanctuary grounds. A hundred volunteers from thirty-one states and Canada went through the first annual real-life exercises for animal admissions, base camp operations, and FEMA-like procedures. A mock base camp was set up in a desert section on the thirty-three-thousand-acre sanctuary grounds. Volunteers were self-sufficient; they brought their own food, tents, and solar showers and set up in a remote area of the sanctuary in Angel Canyon, located about thirty miles southeast of Zion National Park.
In the days and weeks following hurricanes Katrina and Rita, accurate information, especially about what was happening to and for the animals, was hard to come by. That’s where a coalition comes into play, to ensure that the next rescue of animals is more organized.
After Katrina, major national animal organizations got together to see if they could coordinate their resources for future disasters and to offer FEMA and state emergency managers a one-stop shop to address animals’ needs for the next disaster.
With that in mind, Best Friends signed on with the coalition of the largest animal welfare groups in the nation. Representatives from those groups met at the Best Friends sanctuary as a formal step in the process of forming the coalition, whose aim is to work together when a disaster strikes and animals are in jeopardy. Also discussed was gaining access to disaster zones. Whereas Best Friends had an agreement after Katrina with Jefferson Parish Animal Control giving its rescue teams access, group
s that had no such agreement were denied access. Had they been allowed in, even more animals could have been saved. In the future, because the coalition is working in concert with FEMA officials, a coordinated effort with full access to a disaster area will help teams search for and rescue pets in a timely fashion.
Best Friends’ rapid response manager Rich Crook emphasized the importance of pulling the individual groups together so that the organizations have a plan in place when another disaster occurs.
The joint group—the National Animal Rescue and Sheltering Coalition, or NARSC, as it’s being called—includes representatives from the American Humane Association, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Code3 Associates, the Humane Society of the United States, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the National Animal Control Association, the Society of Animal Welfare Administration, United Animal Nations, and Best Friends Animal Society.
After leaving Camp Tylertown in late November 2005, I returned to the Gulf Coast region in January 2006, this time to spend the majority of my time in New Orleans, Waveland, and Gulfport to write an in-depth piece for Best Friends magazine about the status of animals still on the streets three months after Katrina. Animal control in the area at the time was reporting that the animals on the streets were simply strays and no different from any other city’s homeless cats and dogs. I went there to see for myself.
What I found was disheartening. The word being sent out by trappers on the ground was that thousands of Katrina pets lost in the storm were still wandering the streets. Seeing the animals in person was shocking. They were skinny, pregnant, or injured, and they ran if you made even the slightest move toward them. Some had been on their own for so long without human contact that they had become feral-like.
