By Carrie Allan
At The HSUS Disaster Response compound in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the dogs need walking. The cats need food and water. The stalls and crates need cleaning. In spite of the fact that they've now got MPs with large machine guns patrolling the compound, security is still an issue; some of the donated supplies were stolen a few nights ago.
A truck full of animals from Louisiana has shown up on the compound unexpectedly, and now someone has to explain to the driver that they can't bring out-of-state animals here.
Some people who've seen the news on TV and show up out of the blue and ask to volunteer, and then leave within a few hours after they get tired of the grueling work. Trucks keep coming in with deliveries of food and crates and leashes and collars and medicines, and there aren't enough people to unload all of it. The veterinary staff at the compound have run low on bordetella vaccine and the response team is scrambling to find a source for more.
Amidst all of this, Laura Bevan of The HSUS patiently fields frantic and angry phone calls from people who've picked up on an online rumor: That the teams in Mississippi and Louisiana are euthanizing animals at the rate of 150 an hour.
It is, of course, only rumor. The Hattiesburg facility has taken in over 1,100 animals so far, and of that number, only 8 have been humanely euthanized. All of them were animals who were either suffering from extreme injuries or were too dangerous to place. Nonetheless, the miracle of technology has helped the rumor spread like wildfire, and Bevan's phone is tied up dispelling the myths.
"No," she says to the latest caller, her face wan and tired. "It makes me upset to hear that. I'm telling you, we have volunteers from all over the place who've come in and are working their butts off from morning until midnight, and they just love these animals so much. I don't think they would have come all this way to euthanize them."
Bevan's actually understating the hours. At midnight, the compound bustles with people and animals. The rescue teams are working in communities along the coast, a good hour from Hattiesburg, and sometimes they don't arrive until 10 p.m. When the animals come in, HSUS staff and volunteers unload the crates from the truck, and staff from Rural Area Veterinary Services (RAVS) check the animals for any injuries or health issues. The animals then get a bath, food and water, and lots of attention from the volunteers, who are lucky if they get to stumble to their tents for sleep by 1 a.m.
All They Have Left
The animals also get a set of papers which may contain clues: to where they came from, to how they got here, and to whether there might be an owner out there searching for them. The papers—which include information about where the animal was found and under what circumstances, whether he was a stray or surrendered by his owner, and notations about his health and behavior since arriving at the facility—are sealed in plastic freezer bags along with any medications the animal is receiving. The bags are clipped to each stall and crate inside the large horse barns that are serving as their temporary home at the Forrest County Multipurpose Center in Hattiesburg.
Most of the notations on the paperwork are brief, cursory. For the shepherd in the lowest barn, the intake papers read "Owners dead." A sad number of animals are coming in with that description—but of course, those two words don't tell the whole story. For the nameless shepherd, the sheriff's department found the dog's owners in their own house. They had drowned there, and the dog stayed with them, lying on top of the man's body to protect it. The storm surge had swept through the house, destroying virtually everything, and the searchers hadn't found any IDs for the people inside.
The officers don't know how the dog survived; no one ever will. But the sheriff who turned the dog over to responders from the Humane Society of Missouri seemed to regard the dog as something special, a talisman of sorts. They were reluctant to let him go, and made the team promise to take good care of him. He's in Hattiesburg now, well-fed and clean, though utterly exhausted. His big paws twitch as he drowses in his stall.
Chance Encounters
The dog's devotion to his people is being matched by that of people for their animals. Reunions are happening daily in Mississippi. A few days ago at the temporary site in Gautier, where animals are held during the day before being transferred up to Hattiesburg, a woman approached the staff very tentatively. She was looking for her dog, Duchess.
"She was choking back tears the whole time," says Sheri Evans, a volunteer from Sumter County, Florida. "She came up and she kept saying to us, 'I know she's dead, I know she's dead, the whole house was destroyed.'"
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| Debra Drake says goodbye to two rescued dogs who were reunited with their owners. |
But as Evans listened to the woman describe her dog, she began to think the animal sounded amazingly familiar. She led her back to the air-conditioned trailer where the cages are, and told her to have a look around. As soon as the woman stepped inside, a big red dog went nuts, says Evans.
"Her butt started banging on the cage and shaking the whole van. And the woman just gasped, and then everyone started crying."
Debra Drake, who was running the Suncoast Humane Society in Florida during the series of hurricanes last year, has been in Hattiesburg for the past week managing the shelter's operations. This past weekend, she started going through some of the lost animal reports that people from the area have filed, and the very first one—a missing Great Dane—rang a bell. There was a Great Dane in the shelter.
She called the man and suggested he come in to have a look, and when he arrived and discovered that it was his dog, he asked hopefully if the compound might have his other dog as well. A walk through the kennels revealed dog number two, an Aussie shepherd mix.
"It was a match we might not have made," says Drake. "The Great Dane was a really unusual dog, but this dog was more common, so it was so important that the owner took the time to come in and search."
Even if none of the people had made the match, the Great Dane could have made it for them: When he saw his friend, he started leaping about and pawing at the other dog's head.
Long Road to Most Reunions
It's reunions like this that get the people working here through the day. Everyone wants to ensure a happy ending for the people and animals who've already been through so much. But there's a new concern: In the rush to help the animals orphaned or left homeless by Katrina, many animal groups have come into the state and are rescuing stray animals and taking them out of the state to adopt them into new homes. As kind as the intention is, it may prevent reunions between people and their pets. It may mean people who live here will never get a chance to find the pets displaced by the storm.
Many of the people in this area have lost everything they own. With no home, no job, no money, and no place to go, people are finding it hard to keep their pets, and so every day, more owner-surrendered animals come in to the facility at Hattiesburg.
"What we're seeing is very much like what we saw after Andrew," says Scott Trebatoski, animal services director for Lee County in Florida, who's been working down in Waveland and other coastal communities. "After a trauma like this, people will try to hold on to their animals as long as possible before they start admitting to themselves that they can't do it."
Trebatoski expects that as the weeks pass, the temporary shelters will start seeing more and more people coming in to give their animals up.
But, Trebatoski notes, many of the people coming in are hoping that they can get their animals into foster care until they get their lives back in order. They are hoping to be reunited.
And he says that the officers in the field and intake staff are also seeing some animals come in with microchips. Especially in a largely rural community, one that was poor long before Katrina struck, that's unusual—a sign of real commitment to a pet.
"A chip down here is like pure gold," he says, "because you hardly ever see it. And if someone's that responsible, you want to make sure they get that animal back."
The state veterinarian for Mississippi, Dr. Jim Watson, has set the rules for animal rescuers working in the state: Animals who are found stray or lost in the communities affected by the hurricane should not be sent out of state. They must come to Hattiesburg so that they can be photographed and entered into the Petfinder.com database. They must be held for 30 days, and only then, if no one has come to bring them home, they can be placed in a new home or sent out of the state for placement.
Walking through the barns here, looking in at all the animals who are now homeless, who have lost their families, who have been through extraordinary stress over the past few weeks, it's easy to understand the desire to sweep them all up and away from this trauma as quickly as possible.
But this is a long process. And when you're fortunate enough to witness the tears, wags, and purrs of a reunion between a loved animal and a pet owner who's been searching for their lost family member, you realize this: Some rules are made to be kept.
Carrie Allan is the associate editor of Animal Sheltering Magazine at The HSUS.
