The brick structure—you really couldn't call it a house anymore after a tornado had ripped through it earlier in the week—was spray-painted with an orange "X" on its exterior, with "K-9" printed inside the teepee of that underused letter. Rob Archibald and Lisa Swanson, members of The HSUS's Disaster Animal Response Team, knew the meaning of the coded message.
They knew that this two-story house in Pierce City, Missouri—a town that on May 4 was essentially turned into a pile of matchsticks and uprooted trees—had already been inspected for human survivors by a search-and-rescue canine team. But the K-9 team had done something unusual: To the left of the orange "X," they had spray-painted "2 cats, kitts." The message was left specially for Archibald and his DART team.
Archibald and Swanson immediately began peering into the structure to locate the animals. They spotted a kitten on the couch; the animal was motionless. The team feared the worst, until they noticed the kitty's paw move. Swanson quickly broke out a window—Archibald didn't want to use the front door because he feared that it might be one of the few things holding up the house—and she gingerly entered the precarious structure.
Swanson, a special agent for the Oregon Humane Society who was called to Missouri as part of the National DART team, later entered this into her diary on the OHS web site: "The kitten was cold to the touch and gasping for breath. He seemed very hypothermic and had difficulty breathing. I held him close to my mouth and blew air into his mouth and started chest compressions. His heart was beating, but much too slowly. We held him close to the heater in the truck as we drove back to BART (the Big Animal Rescue Truck, which arrived on the scene in Pierce City)…Inside the small medical facility in BART, I gave the kitten fluids and oral glucose. He slowly began to warm up, and his breathing improved. Yet every once in a while he would suddenly gasp for breath, his heart would stop beating, and I would start chest compressions again. It was clear that he needed much more care than we could give him. We drove him to the local vet's clinic to be evaluated."
The local vet said the kitten had suffered a massive head trauma. The animal died on the examining table.
The unfortunate kitten became one of the tornado's victims, yet one who will never be tallied in the official fatality count. The kitten never really had a chance, of course, but the DART team's actions in this tragic rescue underscore two important points: They will do anything within their power to try to save a family's pet, and their very presence allows the human search-and-rescue teams not to worry about the many animals displaced and injured during a natural disaster.
Humans certainly had plenty to worry about in Pierce City and surrounding Lawrence County. The human fatality count was mercifully low (only five dead in the county), but the physical damage to the city was great. Pierce City's Main Street was virtually wiped out, and an estimated 100 homes were leveled in this town of about 1,400 people. (An estimated 270 homes were destroyed in Lawrence County, 90% of them residential.) Folks needed to focus on getting their lives back together. The DART team allow them to do so, free of worries about their pets.
The DART team was called to Pierce City by the Carthage Humane Society, located about 25 miles to the northwest. The nine-member DART team arrived on Tuesday, May 6, and the last two members, Archibald and Swanson, didn't leave Pierce City until Saturday, May 10. For those five days, the DART team performed a variety of functions: They broke into three smaller teams. Two of them divided the city in half, east and west, and literally went house to house, looking for animals. The third team stayed behind in the BART truck to treat injured and lost animals and to coordinate the field squads.
On the first full day of searches, the teams spent much of their time making sure that the cats and dogs they spotted had owners to care for them. This task sounds easier than it is. After a disaster, some animals appear homeless when they're not; others, just the opposite. The DART teams came across many cats and dogs, but most of them still had someone to care for them. For those animals who appeared homeless, the DART teams initially just fed and watered them, but before leaving, the team members posted a note that asked the owner to call an emergency number to verify that the animal indeed had a caretaker. If no one called, the teams would swoop in the next day to shelter the animal until the owner was found.
In all, the DART teams picked up about 40 animals and took them to the BART truck for care and/or treatment. By the time the truck had to leave Pierce City, 32 of those animals still had not been reunited with their owners: four dogs, 13 puppies, six cats, and nine kittens were either put in veterinary care or transported to Carthage Humane Society for adoption, according to Diane Webber, director of The HSUS's Midwest Regional Office, which responded to the emergency in Pierce City. Later, after the BART truck had left, an additional three cats, seven kittens, seven puppies and a beagle were brought to the temporary shelter in Pierce City, Webber added.
Three of those rescued cats belonged to an antiques dealer whose third-story apartment, according to Swanson, "became a first-story apartment in a matter of less than 20 seconds." The dealer was severely injured during the storm and has had to undergo several surgeries. Despite his pain and the lost of his business, however, the hospitalized dealer has apparently thought of little besides the four cats he left behind when he was rescued from his crumbling building. He even called the mayor of Pierce City to ask if the DART team could enter his building to set traps for the cats. The mayor relented, despite the fact that these downtown structures were deemed unsafe by city engineers.
A city engineer had to coach DART team members Swanson and Bruce Earnest through the dealer's unstable apartment on Friday, May 9. "The engineer would tell them not to touch this or that, not to walk too fast, or not to touch any poles that might be holding the place up," Archibald recalled. The team managed to set two traps, both baited with some extremely smelly mackerel, without incident. Later that night, they returned to check the traps, but found them empty.
The following morning as Archibald and Swanson were wrapping up DART operations in Pierce City, Scott Wahl, the town's volunteer animal control officer, pulled up in an ATV. On the back of it was a trap. In it was one of the antique dealer's beloved cats, a 20-pound Maine coon cat. Later, two other cats were humanely captured in the apartment as well.
The dealer was undoubtedly relieved when he heard that three of his four cats were rescued. But like many disasters, the news was bittersweet for this victim. Facing a long hospitalization and an even longer physical therapy schedule, the man decided he could no longer care for them. He put the animals up for adoption.
The word is that Pierce City officials have a special interest in finding these cats a home. And for good reason: It's a way for residents to repair one small wound, among the hundreds that nearly wiped out this small Missouri town.
