By Carrie Allan

September 8, 2005

GAUTIER, MISSISSIPPI - The owner of the mass breeding facility for miniature pinschers and pit bull terriers in Gautier, Mississippi is elderly and disabled. He is also very religious. And when disaster responders from the Humane Society of Missouri and The HSUS Disaster Animal Response Teams showed up at his crushed and flooded kennels last week after the hurricane, he was sure they'd been sent by a higher power.

Disaster response team member Kyle Held, a statewide investigator with the Humane Society of Missouri, came down with his team in the days right after the storm. Like The HSUS Disaster Animal Response Teams (DART) working in Mississippi, they'd been checking in with local municipalities, assessing the needs, trying to pick their way through an area that was still cluttered with debris, downed power lines, and closed roads.

Pascagoula Animal Control alerted the team to a man who owned the breeding facility to see how he had weathered the storm, and so the team drove their huge white truck over to investigate the damage.

What they found horrified them: The tidal surge from the Mississippi Sound had washed a massive amount of debris, water, and mud over the kennels. The buildings had partially collapsed.

"When we knocked on the door and he opened up, he literally hit his knees thanking God that we'd come," says Held. "He said he'd been praying all night for help."

The strange thing, says Held, was that soon after the response team arrived on the property, the man's pastor showed up as well. "It kinda makes you wonder," says Held.

The owner had been trying to get through to help the trapped animals, but his physical condition had prevented him from making much of an impact. He'd managed to get a few of the dogs out, but most were still pinned under and behind the massive amount of branches, mud, and other refuse swept in from the sea with the storm surge. The team could hear the dogs yelping and crying underneath the wreckage.

As the owner of a mass breeding facility that may have put dogs at risk even before the storm, and despite his initial gratitude, the owner was suspicious of the motives of the teams from animal welfare organizations. But with some persuasion from Held and the owner's pastor, the man agreed to allow responders back onto his property to help.

Held came back later that afternoon with a six person team from both his own shelter and from The HSUS Disaster Animal Response Teams who are working all along the Gulf Coast and in Louisiana.

"We chain-sawed our way through to the dogs," Held says.

Inside the kennels they found dogs dead and alive. The dogs in the lower cages had drowned; the owner had already moved some of the bodies to a dumpster nearby. Held observed that the inside of the kennels were so filled with debris and bodies that it was hard to tell how many animals had been killed. He estimates that there had been around 150 animals at the facility before Hurricane Katrina hit, and that about half of them were dead.

The team got the rest of the dogs out alive—filthy, frightened, dehydrated, but alive.

The owner agreed to relinquish several of the dogs to the team, so three pit bulls and three miniature pinschers got a ticket out of the scene. He's promised to surrender a few more, and his pastor has been helping the disaster response team persuade the man that neither he nor his property are well suited to care for the number of animals he has.

"This facility wasn't great to begin with," says Held, "and the storm has pushed it enough that we can get in and help."

It may or may not have been divine intervention. But the disaster response team saved the lives of a lot of lucky dogs in Gautier last week, and Kyle Held got to hear something he never thought he'd hear from the mouth of a puppy mill owner: "You guys have restored my faith in humane societies."

Carrie Allan is the associate editor of Animal Sheltering Magazine at The HSUS.