Maps of Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and the greater New Orleans area are tacked to a side wall. Notes and contact names and phone numbers are scribbled with markers on a dry-erase board that covers the back wall. Nine boxes stuffed with thousands of animal intake reports crowd a pair of folding tables that have been draped with royal blue coverings, one of which is stamped with the logo of The HSUS. Fifteen computers, each with a phone next to it, sit on long narrow conference room tables that have been pushed into a giant rectangle, in the middle of which is a snake pit of cords and wires. Paperwork, folders, and intake trays are everywhere. A sign on the back door asks all visitors to remain quiet.
Welcome to The HSUS Reunion Center.
The name is deceptive. It doesn't offer a single clue to the many headaches involved in reaching that ultimate goal: a reunion. In the days after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast on August 29, the reunion center was known as the call center, and it served as a hotline for evacuees who desperately wanted rescue teams to save their stranded pets in New Orleans or Mississippi or wherever animals were left behind. But as the weeks passed, and after thousands of animals had been rescued, the call center shifted its focus. It transformed into a reunion center.
A reunion center implies a sort of simplicity: Katrina evacuees search the Petfinder.com or Petharbor.com web sites for their missing animals or phone our off-site call center with a lost pet report, the volunteers at the reunion center then comb through the databases to track down the missing animal, and once found, the fostering shelter sends the pet back to the owner. Presto, instant reunion.
The reality is far more complicated. More than 8,000 pets were rescued along the Gulf Coast. Each animal required an intake record that included as much information on the pet and his or her location as possible, and each animal was eventually moved to a shelter somewhere in the United States. More than 220 shelters and foster groups currently hold rescued Katrina animals, and in order to ensure a pet-owner reunion, each one of these groups must uphold its end of a painstaking and time-consuming process.
As every worker in the reunion center will tell you, complications arise in this process. Intake records may be incomplete, export information may not have been inputted into the database, shelters may not have yet updated the records on the pets they're holding, or shelters may have assigned a new ID number to the animals in their possession. Or animals may have been rescued by a group that worked outside the official system. There are a thousand and one complications that could, and do, affect the ability to track down a missing pet. As a result, reunion center workers are part detective, part crisis counselor, and part miracle worker.
And yet, the miraculous happens every day at the reunion center: Separated by distance, tragedy, and a complicated paper trail, many pets and owners still find each other. To date, more than 460 reunions have been confirmed from the HSUS Reunion Center. (The number, incidentally, does not include the nearly 700 reunions that have taken place in Louisiana, Mississippi or through other agencies themselves.)
The Road to Reunion
Perhaps 460 reunions doesn't sound like a lot, particularly when more than 2,000 lost pet reports still need some sort of resolution. But before you rush to judgment, consider this: It can take days, sometimes weeks, to match pet and pet owner. And even then, things can unravel.
Consider the case of Jack, a German shepherd mix whose owner has been desperately trying to find him. Courtney Warholic, one of several temps whom The HSUS has hired to help in a reunion center already staffed with dozens of employees and volunteers, has made it her mission to pair Jack with his owner. After days of searching, she thought she had made a match; in fact, in her notebook Warholic had already handwritten the word, in large capital letters, "REUNITED," on Jack's lost pet report, with little hearts around it.
Warholic's optimism was based on her own hard work. She had talked countless times with the owner and with the shelter that apparently held Jack. Warholic knew from her conversations that Jack has an identifiable scar on his underside, and so she pored over a few pictures of an animal that both she and the owner thought was Jack. The dog seemed to have the same scar in the same place. The owner and Warholic grew excited at the possibility of a reunion. But before shipping the animal back to the owner, Warholic wanted to be 100% certain. She asked the shelter to take more pictures of the dog. When the images came back, Warholic realized the animal was not Jack. He was too young, and had different coloring on his chest.
It was back to square one for Warholic and Jack.
Square one can be a confusing place to start. When a lost pet report comes across their desk, reunion center case workers usually begin by phoning the owner to make sure the pet is still missing. If so, the case workers will then focus on the lost pet ID number. If they're lucky, it will correspond to the Petfinder.com or Petharbor.com ID number, which the owners will have tracked down online, in hopes that the animal pictured on the web site is actually theirs. The case worker will then check the record on the web site. In the best of all possible worlds, that record will say exactly where the animal is—perhaps in a shelter in Marin County, California, for example—and that animal will actually be the missing pet in question.
Suffice to say this scenario rarely happens. And so the pet detectives in the reunion center must get to work.
The ID number may indeed be tied to an online record, but the record may not have the animal's latest information. So then the reunion center case worker has to check the export records from Lamar-Dixon—the temporary shelter that The HSUS and others ran in Gonzales, Louisiana for many weeks—to see if those records indicate to where this particular animal was shipped. If there's nothing in the export log, the case worker may then have to begin a new search on Petfinder, based on the pet owner's address, as there may be more than one record for each animal in the database.
Take, for example, the case of the missing black-and-white cat from St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans. A part-time HSUS employee, who's working mostly in the reunion center now, has been trying for days to locate this pet. Based on the owner's address, the employee searched through the Petfinder database and discovered eight different records, each representing a black and white kitty who was either lost or rescued in that single vicinity. The employee neatly wrote down each record's ID number, and then called the cat's owner. Together, the two of them went through each record to determine if the cat was indeed the missing animal. None was.
Reunions Happen
Despite the complexity of the search, matches and reunions do happen—every day in fact. In the parlance of reunion center workers, reunions are far more preferred over matches. Reunions mean that pet and owner have found each other again. Matches can mean a number of things. They can mean the reunion center case worker has positively matched an owner with the record of his or her animal, but the record may indicate that the rescuers found the animal dead. Or that only one of several animals was found. Or that the animal was found, but the owner died during the storm. These are closed cases, but not happily so.
The reunions are the ultimate goal, and they're happening more frequently. "The searches are more fruitful today than they were a week ago," said Betsy McFarland, director of communications for The HSUS's Companion Animal section, who has been leading the reunion efforts along with several other HSUS staffers. "But they still take time to complete."
And time is a precious commodity these days. It's been nearly two months since Katrina hit, and the official, Louisiana-mandated holding deadline has passed for shelters and foster groups that agreed to take animals from Lamar-Dixon. But The HSUS and other national groups have worked with all the parties that took animals and convinced the vast majority of them to extend the deadline. Some may even hold animals until the end of the year to ensure that owners have enough time to get back on their feet and find their pets.
What everyone wants now is what happened to Chico, a black chihuahua who got caught up in Katrina's chaos. Chico was rescued from his home in New Orleans and brought to Lamar-Dixon. The daughter of Chico's owners called looking for the little pooch. She thought she had located the animal on Petfinder, but when Carrie Allan, the associate editor for Animal Sheltering who's working full-time on reunions now, checked the record, she found that this particular animal was actually rescued in Mississippi, not New Orleans.
Allan then ran a new search on Petfinder, based on the owners' address. She found an exact match: a black chihuahua rescued from that location. Allan then ran the intake number against Lamar-Dixon's export record, and it said that the dog was taken to a shelter in Tennessee. Allan checked with the shelter, and learned the animal was not there. A dead end. A day or two later, Allan decided on a whim to check Chico's Petfinder record again. To her great surprise, it was updated. The record now indicated that Chico was at the SPCA of Texas, based in Dallas. Allan called and confirmed exactly that.
The reunion, in short, couldn't have happened without all the players involved: the family looking to reunite with its pet, the reunion center worker constantly checking up on the case, and the shelter continually updating the records on the animals in its possession. The system, even with all its chaotic imperfections, worked.
And it will work again, and again and again.
