November 29, 2005

Three months ago today, New Orleans braced for a storm that nearly everyone thought would be the ruin of the historic city near the mouth of the Mississippi River. In the 92 days since Hurricane Katrina caused the city's levee system to fail and turned New Orleans into a giant soup bowl, thousands of people have worked to assess the storm's lingering effects: a population resistant to return, a crippled economy, a lack of power, few open schools, and countless other aftershocks both major and minor.

Among the ongoing concerns in the Crescent City are the animals. Three months after Katrina, the population of New Orleans is estimated at 150,000 during the day, and 75,000 at night when many of the commuters leave. That's just a fraction of the half million people who called the Big Easy home before Katrina. Unfortunately, the animals do not have the same ease of movement. No one knows the exact number, but many animals are still believed to be roaming the city, hiding under millions of tons of debris or hunkering down in abandoned houses, each animal with no one in particular to look out for him or her.

That's why The HSUS remains committed to rescues, trapping, and other field work along the Gulf Coast even though our most obvious contribution —the rescue and sheltering operation at the Lamar-Dixon Expo in Gonzales, Louisiana—closed more than a month ago. Granted, those days at Lamar-Dixon drew most of the media attention and required an enormous amount of money—whether to pay for airplane transports and tractor-trailer rentals or to cover the roundtrip travel costs for more than 1,000 volunteers—but that operation was still only one part of The HSUS's multi-pronged response to Katrina.

"Some folks get confused because we closed the primary facility we helped run at Lamar-Dixon when the state of Louisiana determined its usefulness was concluded," said Dave Pauli, a two-time incident commander at Lamar-Dixon. "But Lamar will historically be just an important but small part of the 'Katrina Response.' We still have active HSUS staff and field-sponsored teams, plus some incredible reunion and call center teams working on Katrina. On any given day as many as 50 HSUS staffers or contractors are still actively working on Katrina issues. It may well be the largest single agency workforce working on Katrina animal issues."

You may already know about our Katrina Shelter Reconstruction Fund (to which The HSUS and the ASPCA contributed an initial $2.5 million each), our Katrina Pet Wellness Program (which provides financial assistance for basic veterinary wellness checkups of pets displaced by the storm), and our early work in the Gulf area, but that's just a blurry, incomplete snapshot of The HSUS's response in the wake of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. To get the full picture, you'd need a wide-angle lens big enough to capture the inside of every cubicle in The HSUS, because at one time or another, every one of the organization's 349 employees has performed tasks related to this year's storms.

At present The HSUS continues to be involved in a number of post-Katrina activities: funding local rescue efforts, providing on-site expertise and covering many expenses for the Louisiana SPCA (LA SPCA), developing and supporting a humane trapping program, rebuilding shelters on the Gulf Coast, and working day and night to help displaced owners reunite with their pets.

Supporting Local Rescue Efforts

Hundreds and hundreds of volunteers worked out of Lamar-Dixon when that site was fully operational, but once the state closed down the facility, a number of those volunteers couldn't just walk away—particularly when they still saw a need for their services. They saw animals still roaming the streets, still without owners, and still struggling to survive in a city saturated with contaminated water and covered with mold. These rescuers also saw that LA SPCA's original building was ruined, and that it would take time for that organization to ramp back up to full capacity. The animals, these volunteers judged, could not wait.

Many of these loose-knit groups and coalitions have approached The HSUS for funds, and we have obliged many of their requests. We've awarded grants, large and small, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. In some instances, we're funding entire teams in New Orleans, volunteer teams that are still trapping animals or feeding and watering them in place. We've given these teams cages, crates, and equipment. We've paid for their transportation costs and expenses. We've even supplied trucks to facilitate their movement around the city.

The relationship has reaped rewards. By some estimates, these groups have rescued more than 1,500 animals since Lamar-Dixon closed down in mid-October. 

We don't stop at the rescues, either. Groups have approached us to pay for the transport of animals out of New Orleans, and we have satisfied many of those requests as well. Most recently, The HSUS footed a substantial bill for a group named Muttshak to ship 80 animals, at $120 an animal, to Washington state, where they have been put into foster care, far away from the mean streets of New Orleans.

Then there is our work with humane companion animal trappers in the area. "We also provided the initial humane trapper training to all the responder groups in October, and have spent well over $100,000 bringing traps, nets, and other animal capture and tracking technologies into New Orleans," noted The HSUS's Pauli. 

Supporting Louisiana SPCA and Others

Since that opening, we have continued to help stabilize the operation so that LA SPCA can carry on its mission in New Orleans. We've provided fencing, generators, permanent kennels, control poles, and other needed equipment. We've provided funds for animal control officers and their trucks, so they can go out into the community and respond to animals in need. We are even paying for security guards on the site. In total, we have committed more than a $1 million to help rebuild LA SPCA.

"The HSUS is committed to help make the LA SPCA become a full-service facility again, perhaps even a broader and deeper one than before," said Melissa Seide-Rubin, HSUS vice president of Field and Disaster Services.

Aside from supporting LA SPCA, The HSUS has also helped other shelters destroyed by Katrina, including the Humane Society of South Mississippi. Our work to rebuild the Gulf Coast's animal care and control infrastructure will continue through the Katrina Shelter Reconstruction Fund; our goal is to grow that fund, with corporate support, to more than $15 million. What's more, we have awarded more than $1 million in grants to local humane societies that took in animals from Louisiana and Mississippi. We even came to the rescue in Arkansas when more than 100 Katrina pets turned up at a facility whose operators were charged with animal cruelty.

Supporting a City-Wide Trapping Program

The HSUS is working to expand and fund a humane companion animal trapping program under the supervision of LA SPCA, with the assistance of a humane trapping expert. The need for such a city-wide program was made clear in mid-November when a multi-agency team, including The HSUS, assessed the "state of animals" in New Orleans.

The HSUS is bringing in an experienced, high-volume humane trapping team, including staffers from our Northern Rockies Regional Office (NRRO), to manage the expanded program, which is expected to launch soon. Even better, the program is expected to coordinate the work of various rescue groups in New Orleans, which should go a long way toward ensuring the capture of as many animals as possible. The field capture teams will employ new technologies, including radio telemetry collars to track lactating females to their "dens" to recover puppies as well as GPS systems to properly locate and recover all traps set. All companion animals trapped will either go through LA SPCA or be shipped to Best Friends Animal Shelter in Mississippi.

"We have purchased several hundred live traps, many costing $200 each, to help get the remaining animals off the street," added Pauli, who's also the director of NRRO. "The cost of just this final stage of animal rescue could eventually run into hundreds of thousands of dollars for the remaining animals when you consider that all the animals have to be vetted, microchipped, photographed, and then exported to other states for foster care, reunions or rehoming."

Supporting Pet Reunions

Back closer to home, at The HSUS's headquarters in the Washington D.C. area, the organization continues to work to match displaced owners with displaced pets via our Reunion Center. The reunion effort is a painstaking process that requires countless work hours; at present, we have more than 40 people devoted to reunions, including more than 20 working full-time on nothing but matches.

To date, all those workers on site have personally assisted with or confirmed 1,308 reunions. Combined with the 837 reunions onsite at Lamar-Dixon, and the 126 in Mississippi, an estimated 2,271 animals have been returned to their owners since Katrina separated them. It's estimated that about 8,500 animals were rescued in the Gulf while The HSUS and other groups were operating facilities in Mississippi and Louisiana; it's not known how many other reunions may have been facilitated by other groups.

Clearly, much more work lies ahead. Betsy McFarland, director of communications for The HSUS's Companion Animals section who has been working full-time on reunions for weeks, said all the remaining cases at the Reunion Center need to be resolved before December 16. The HSUS and other animal organizations had urged shelters and rescue groups around the nation to hold displaced Katrina pets until December 15; after that date, any Katrina animals still in shelters will begin to be adopted to new homes.

"We care a great deal about the owners and the animals, and we want to see as many reunions as possible before December 16," McFarland said.

Once a match has been made, The HSUS will even help get that animal home. The HSUS/ASPCA Pet Reunification Fund is a program that reimburses local animal shelters for the costs of transporting pets back to their owners. The HSUS and the ASPCA reimburse approved shelters the actual cost of transporting animals to their owners.