The last animal left the Lamar-Dixon emergency shelter in Gonzales, Louisiana, on Monday morning, October 10. While staff and volunteers at the facility didn't literally roll out the red carpet for the rescued 45-pound pit bull mix, they did drive the pooch to the transport vehicle on a golf cart. The dog was then loaded, crate and all, onto a refrigerator truck bound for Mississippi as about 20 spectators applauded, snapped a photo, or wiped tears from their eyes.

The spontaneous outburst of emotion was understandable: The departing dog not only symbolized the end of the grueling shelter work at Lamar-Dixon, but also culminated weeks of back-breaking labor which went into rescuing, cleaning, housing, feeding, and treating the more than 5,000 animals who came through the facility, located about 60 miles north of New Orleans. The outburst of emotion was a combination of joy, sadness, satisfaction, and relief. And hope.

Hope because every one of those volunteers and staffers knew that the story doesn't end here for thousands of animals still waiting to reunite with their owners. Leaving Lamar-Dixon is, in some ways, the beginning of their journey back home. The last dog out of Lamar-Dixon, in fact, likely has a multi-week stopover in Mississippi before he'll see the comfort of someone's couch.

The Last Days of Lamar-Dixon

The last dog's golf cart ride from Barn 1 to the transport truck had nothing to do with his lofty place in the history of this unprecedented rescue and sheltering operation. It had more to do with a common behavioral problem: The animal was not leash trained. More to the point, he was a pit bull mix who was deemed aggressive. A group in Mississippi agreed to take the grouchy pooch (along with 27 other pits at Lamar-Dixon) and work to reunite them with owners or find them a new one.

Earlier that same morning another truck left Lamar-Dixon carrying a load of pit bulls—about 36 of them—on its way to Dixon Correctional Institute in Jackson, Louisiana, where the vehicle picked up another 58 animals who were temporarily housed in the medium-security prison under the supervision of The HSUS. Those 94 animals were then given a one-way flight to Los Angeles, where they will likely begin a new life in Southern California. The flight was paid for by The HSUS.

And with those two departures, there were no more animals remaining at Lamar-Dixon. The last dog on the last truck out of the facility left at 7:30 a.m. on Monday.

That left a number of volunteers and HSUS staff members to clean up the place, wrap up supplies, and store up as many memories as they could.

The first order of business was accumulating memories. Volunteers pulled out their cameras and began clicking off pictures wherever it made sense: next to the last animal transport out of Lamar-Dixon, next to the converted horse barns where they made life more comfortable for thousands of animals, next to the Lost Pets desk, wherever this disaster had taken them for the past days and weeks. For a select few people, collecting memories included collecting an unclaimed animal. Volunteers from some smaller shelters around the country took back an animal to foster—usually an animal they had cared for and had bonded with—until a match could be made with the owner.

Then everyone got down to the business at hand: cleaning up Lamar-Dixon, a sprawling compound on which The HSUS had leased space, including three horse barns to shelter the thousands of the dogs, cats, parrots, snakes, rabbits, and chickens rescued from south Louisiana since Katrina hit on August 29. (Additionally, we leased two other barns, which the Louisiana State University veterinary school used to house rescued horses and other hooved animals.) The clean up of the five barns was expected to continue until Thursday, October 13, or Friday, October 14, when the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center would no longer echo with the barking of dogs, but with the facility's more familiar clip-clopping of horse hooves.

Melissa Seide-Rubin, HSUS vice president of field and disaster services and the last incident commander at Lamar-Dixon, said it will take thousands of man-hours to clean the barns. Volunteers and staff must remove the wood shavings in each horse stall, and then spray down and disinfect each one.

Stall clean-up aside, Dr. Leo Egar, a veterinarian with The HSUS's Rural Area Veterinary Services, said there are also more than 120 pallets of food and supplies to move out of Lamar-Dixon. Perishable food, medical supplies, and animal crates will be shipped to shelters in Louisiana as well as Louisiana SPCA's temporary new facility in Algiers, just outside New Orleans, which started accepting animals on Monday.

Whatever nonperishable items remain—crates, box fans, tools, and the like—will be wrapped, palletized, and stored for future disasters, Egar said. The items will likely be stored in a warehouse in Atlanta, far enough away from hurricane strike zones in the Gulf and Atlantic regions, but close enough to move supplies in quickly.

Once the supplies are moved and the facility cleaned, the operation at Lamar-Dixon will officially come to a close, ending what many believe was the largest animal rescue and sheltering operation in our nation's history. At Lamar-Dixon alone, rescuers, representing animal care and control groups from all over the country, saved 6,036 animals from New Orleans and surrounding areas, and returned 500 of them to their owners from the compound in Gonzales. (Another 2,385 animals were rescued in Mississippi, and of that number, 126 have been returned to their owners.) Pet reunions now continue to happen at shelters around the country and through The HSUS's Disaster Call Center.

"Katrina did something that no other disaster in the history of our country had done before: It brought together animal protection groups, large and small, for the single purpose of saving as many stranded animals as humanely possible along the Gulf Coast," said HSUS President & CEO Wayne Pacelle, who spent two weeks in Gonzales helping to oversee operations. "While there were bumps along the way, the bottom line is that we rescued, sheltered, and treated thousands of animals, sparing many from an almost certain death. Now we have to seal the deal and continue to work on reuniting them back with their original owners, and to work with policymakers to see that animals are duly factored into the broader rescue and relief efforts conducted by federal, state, and local authorities."

The First Days of LA SPCA's Algiers Facility

Louisiana SPCA, whose original shelter on Japonica Street in New Orleans was severely flooded and rendered uninhabitable, started on Monday to accept critical animals into its new temporary facility in Algiers, located just across the Mississippi from its old location. The group, which is looking to resume animal control work in New Orleans soon, is expected to stay in the temporary structure, a converted warehouse, for at least two years.

Converting the 45,000-square-foot warehouse into an operating animal shelter has been more than a notion. The process was complicated even more when the outer edges of Hurricane Rita caused some fairly serious roof damage at the warehouse, which the owners had to repair. But even without Rita's messiness, the warehouse needed a lot of work to turn it into a full-time animal shelter.

Steve Putnam, vice president of business development and corporate relations for The HSUS, has traveled to Algiers twice in recent weeks to help LA SPCA with its new facility. Putnam, who has a background in building construction, has helped secure electrical contractors and plumbers to build out the warehouse; he's also helped to stock the facility with supplies. The HSUS has purchased 300 temporary kennels for the warehouse, along with opaque plastic sheeting to hang between the kennels to better separate the dogs. We've also purchased 200 cat condos and 20 large industrial fans for the LA SPCA to use on site, and have worked with PETsMART to donate 50 rabbit cages and 25 pocket pet cages to the temporary space. We've even purchased a trailer to house volunteers.

In looking to the future of LA SPCA, The HSUS has started soliciting bids to purchase permanent kennels for the Algiers facility at a cost of between $500,000 and $750,000, a pricetag that United Animal Nations has agreed to help pay. The HSUS and the ASPCA have also made initial pledges of $2.5 million each for the Katrina Shelter Reconstruction Fund, part of which will help LA SPCA eventually build a more permanent facility. The goal is to grow that fund, with corporate support, to $15 million.

Of course, all of these supplies and support wouldn't mean much without space and shelter planning. Kate Pullen, director of Animal Sheltering Issues at The HSUS, has spent considerable time in Algiers helping the LA SPCA map out its facility. A former manager of a Washington D.C. area shelter, Pullen has worked with staffers from LA SPCA and from other large animal shelters around the country who were called upon by the Society of Animal Welfare Administrators to assist in rebuilding the shelter and LA SPCA's programs. One of their first tasks was to carve up the massive warehouse into usable spaces that work for both animals and humans.  Together, they have helped design a floor plan that keeps cats away from dogs, aggressive dogs away from submissive ones, and provides a central space for LA SPCA's veterinarian and vet techs.

And those opaque plastic sheets for the temporary kennels? That was Pullen's idea. Without the sheets, the dogs would have been able to see and have nose-to-nose contact with one another through the Cyclone fence kennels, which could create problems for managers and animals alike. Pullen and Jo-Anne Roman, senior director of operations for the Humane Society of Broward County (Florida), are now working with LA SPCA on building out its animal control section in the warehouse space.

With the Algiers facility now semi-operational, LA SPCA has begun to take in critically ill or injured rescued animals from New Orleans instead of sending them to veterinary clinics around the city. It's just one more small step toward normalcy in a city that hasn't experienced much since late August.

From Rescues to Reunions

The work for The HSUS is far from over. We predict that we'll continue to help animals and shelters in the Gulf Coast regions for months, and possibly years, to come.

In recent days, the most pressing need has been helping pet owners reunite with their animals. More than 40 HSUS staff members (and a small cadre of volunteers) have forsaken their regular jobs and have become de facto case workers in helping displaced residents find their displaced animals. It is a long, tedious, and often thankless job, and these workers are operating under deadline pressure. Although initially informed that they should hold Katrina's animal victims only until October 15, shelters and rescue groups have been asked by HSUS and ASPCA to hold animals until November 15 or longer. Most of the groups have agreed to the extension.

More than 200 cooperating groups from across the country are currently holding animals displaced by Katrina, and in order to reunite pet with owner, each of those groups needs to upload information into central databases so that HSUS case workers can attempt to track down missing animals. Each day, hundreds of anxious pet owners phone our Disaster Call Center, hoping to reunite with their animals. Once the call is taken, each case worker must then comb through the databases in an attempt to locate the animal. Sometimes the owner can't provide much more information than a basic description of the animal and a location where the pet lived; on the flip side, the databases through which the case workers must search may not even include an address or any specific information on the missing animal, depending on how much information the original rescuer included on the intake form.

In short, matching pet to owner can take a lot of detective work. Each case takes hours to solve. To date, The HSUS call center has helped reunite more than 200 pets with their owners. By one count, there are still more than 14,000 records on the Petfinder.com web site, which is the primary database through which case workers search.

Clearly, there's a lot more work ahead of us.