HSUS Rescue Totals Louisiana & Mississippi

Confirmed Totals to Date: 2935 Dogs: 1392         Cats: 457 Horses: 121 Other Animals: 965 Updated: September 10, 9:00 a.m.

By Tim Carman

September 10, 4:27 p.m.

Scenes from The HSUS's rescue and sheltering operations in Louisiana reveal the breadth of hurricane relief efforts—and the challenges our teams are facing on the ground.

Dog Miracle From St. Bernard

More than 150 owners have already reunited with their pets by Friday, according to records at the Lamar-Dixon emergency shelter, including 85 cats and 67 dogs. One of those reunions must certainly fall under the miraculous category.

Lisa Saxon from Chalmette, located just east of New Orleans, arrived at Lamar-Dixon on Thursday looking for her missing dog, Rusty. Unfortunately for Saxon, her home is located in St. Bernard Parish, where animal rescue crews are not allowed because of toxic chemical spills in the area.

As Saxon stood there talking to an HSUS staffer explaining the situation, a large stock trailer pulled up in the Lamar-Dixon compound. Police officers in St. Bernard Parish surprised everyone by personally bringing in a load of dogs.

When Saxon turned around to inspect the stopped trailer, "she was nose to nose with her dog," said the HSUS staffer who witnessed the reunion. "We were all crying."

A Tale of Two Dogs

DART team member Bruce Earnest loads Tully into an animal control truck.

Not all dogs can be sweet-talked. Just ask Bruce Earnest. In a matter of minutes on Tuesday afternoon, this member of The HSUS's DART team used the exact same phrase to round up one pooch—and drive another away.

Tully, a chunky black and brown mix, was standing on the sidewalk with two residents who said they were looking after the unleashed animal since Tully's owners evacuated New Orleans this morning. Earnest calmly approached the large dog and cooed, "Hey, baby, whatcha doin'?" Tully lowered his head, inched closer to Earnest, and in seconds was safely leashed.

Five minutes later, Earnest found a free-roaming dog chomping rotting foodstuffs outside a looted store near the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. Once again, Earnest approached and said sweetly, "Hey, baby, whatcha doin'?"

The dog bolted.

Doctor’s Report

More than 2,000 animals have poured into the Lamar-Dixon emergency shelter since September 1, but despite the harrowing conditions many of the animals endured before arriving, the vast majority are in surprisingly good condition, according to a veterinarian with Veterinary Medical Assistance Teams (VMAT), a federal emergency veterinary team under FEMA.

Even though approximately 150 animals had been given fluids as of Friday night, less than ten were dehydrated severely enough to require a constant IV drip, said Dr. Garry Goemann, commander of VMAT 5. Heat exhaustion has not been a problem either, he said, despite the fact that the dogs and cats are living in open-air horse stalls. The animals, the veterinarian noted, live in the swampy south, so they are acclimated to the heat to a large degree.

By far the biggest medical problem, Goemann said, is stress. Cats are sheltered within earshot of large barking dogs, and their crates offer no hiding spaces for the felines to feel safe. Goemann said veterinarians are treating stressed cats with fluids.

The main problem for dogs, the veterinarian said, appears to be heartworms. Only five tests have been conducted for heartworms, but three came back positive. Goemann said he can’t yet extrapolate that data to claim that 60 percent of dogs have heartworms.

Regardless of what medical issues arise, the animals will be well-cared for. More than 40 VMAT veterinarians are on duty at the Lamar-Dixon facility.

O in N.O.

For Bruce Earnest, a member of The HSUS's Disaster Animal Response Team (DART), words couldn't describe the stench he encountered inside the devastated Superdome on Sunday. Disgusting, awful, hideous. For Earnest, none of those words captured the worst smell he had ever breathed into his lungs. He called it a combination of sweat, feces, urine, and who knows what else. So imagine his surprise when, amid the squalor of the scene, he saw Oprah Winfrey walking around the Superdome.

It's true. New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin had invited Oprah to tour the stadium (among other sites), which city officials are debating scrapping because it sustained massive structural damage. When Oprah saw the DART members in action, Earnest said, she raised her arms in the air and shouted, "Thank God they didn't forget the animals!" She then visited the 30 or so animals that the team members had rescued from the Superdome, including a mother dog and her 11 pups.

Oprah's support was so emphatic that Lou Guyton, command leader of The HSUS's rescue operation at Gonzales, Louisiana, just outside New Orleans, remarked that if the animals need anything, "I'm going to call Oprah."

Blood Draining...

HSUS volunteer Jane Garrison with a rescued kitten.

While rescuing animals on a blisteringly hot Tuesday afternoon, a pair of Louisiana SPCA staffers surveyed the damage to the Coliseum, a classic movie house on Camp Street that Hollywood had restored to glory to film Anne Rice's popular novel Interview with a Vampire. Katrina had destroyed the marquee in front of the theater and sheared away much of the Coliseum's grand façade.

Across the street, HSUS volunteer Jane Garrison was creating damage of her own, ending their reverie over the fallen theater: With three mighty kicks of her boot, she opened a door, and then she and Earnest rescued a cat found hiding in an apartment.

Since Fleming's house is near a refinery that apparently spilled crude oil throughout the neighborhood, she faces the possibility of losing both her home and her animals, but she is determined to do everything she can not to lose the latter. At the rescue desk, Fleming placed her hopes of saving her dogs with rescue teams.

No Comparison

Many of the animal rescue workers in New Orleans are veterans of disaster scenes. They've been through wildfires in California, tornadoes in Missouri, and countless hurricanes, including Andrew and the trio of storms last year in Florida. But to a person, none of them has seen anything like the devastation that Katrina has wrought.

Richard Rice, an HSUS staffer in the Southeast Regional Office, recalled that Hurricane Charlie's powerful wallop seemed to flatten more houses last year when the gale winds hit densely populated areas, but that Katrina damaged a far wider area. Katrina has also caused more long-term problems like standing and contaminated water, which officials on Wednesday linked to a few deaths outside of New Orleans and which in part led Mayor Nagin to order a mandatory evacuation of the city.

"This is bigger than all of us," says Guyton. "This is probably the biggest natural disaster in our nation in our lifetime."

Regional Differences

Margaret Calvano, a Humane Society of Broward County staffer on the scene in south Louisiana, was one of the few people to witness both incarnations of Katrina: The Category 1 storm in south Florida (which "did more damage than we thought") and the Category 5 killer it became, which made the earlier version seem like a summer shower. Calvano also saw how two different regions prepared for Katrina.

The Humane Society of Broward County, along with the American Red Cross, had established a animal-friendly shelter for people in Tamarac, Florida, large enough to house 160 dogs and 120 cats. Only a handful of people actually ended up using it, but according to Calvano, that's not the point.

The point is that south Louisiana, by comparison, had few or no animal-friendly shelters for residents of New Orleans and other towns. People who refused to leave their pets behind—a large number, as rescue teams are learning—could have been spared a lot of heartache had they been able to evacuate to shelters that accepted both humans and pets. Such arrangements might have saved the lives of countless animals and perhaps some people, too.

Two More Reasons for Pet Friendly Shelters…

Eugene Kaufman cradles Samantha before turning the 20-year-old dog over to team members to check her health.

HSUS's Kathy Milani was part of a rescue team on Monday night that stopped on Interstate 10 in the heart of New Orleans to see if any of the evacuees boarding buses had animals that they were being required to surrender. She had seen a family walking along the highway with a metal shopping cart filled with about six dogs. To get on the bus out of town, the family would have had to leave their animals with the rescue workers at the Gonzales facility.

All members of the family, Milani said, chose to continue walking down the interstate, dogs rattling in the shopping cart.

Likewise, Eugene Kaufman, a New Orleans resident who lives near the Ernest Morial Convention Center, adamantly refused to hand over any of his dogs lounging on the metal steps to his storm-damaged apartment. He said he couldn't stand to part with any of them, even temporarily. But then, as the rescue teams were about to leave his neighborhood, he approached a team member and wondered whether we could help his 20-year-old dog, Samantha, whose eyes were filled with creamy white mucus.

The team told him that we could take Samantha, treat her eye condition, give her a bath, and check out any other ailments. He carefully considered the option and accepted. Minutes later, he walked down the steps with Samantha cradled in his arms, crying the entire way to the animal control truck.

Veterinarians later said that Samantha was completely blind—but otherwise appeared to be in surprisingly good health.

Tim Carman is the managing editor of hsus.org.