By Tim Carman

GONZALES, LOUISIANA – The rescue workers get all the headlines. The volunteers get all the soiled newspapers.

Well, technically, that's not correct. Newspapers aren't used much at the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center, where The HSUS and the Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (LA/SPCA) have established perhaps the largest emergency rescue animal shelter in modern history. But the point is the same: The volunteers are the faceless folks who actually have to do the dirty work to care for the animals who are often so dramatically rescued in the field.

Volunteers clean cages. They fill water dishes and food bowls. They take dogs for walks, and empty litter boxes. They give animals baths, and pick up poop off the hot pavement when pooches don't quite make it to designated walk areas.

The volunteers, people like Kevin White, keep the Lamar-Dixon shelter running.

White is the team leader for Barn 2, where he coordinates between 20 and 30 people whose primary job is to keep the 108 converted horse stalls, and their temporary canine occupants, standing tall. Back in Broward County, Florida, White is a special events coordinator and development officer. His knowledge of managing large-scale events serves him well in this disaster zone.

Prior to sending his troops into the stalls, he lays out the battle plan with military precision. The volunteers should break into teams of five: one person to walk the dogs, and the other four to clean the crates, replace and refill the bowls, sanitize the used bowls, wash the animals, mark the charts, and toss the squeaky toys back into the cages. A stocky man with glasses, a ruddy face, and fondness for Ohio State sportswear, White exudes competence and compassion. He encourages the team members to switch jobs as they move from stall to stall, because he knows that, "We all love to walk the dogs."

Volunteer Mary Hammer loves dogs, period. She has five of them back in Placerville, California, near Sacramento, and she plans to take ten days of unpaid leave as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist to work with canines at Lamar-Dixon.

A Different Kind of Working in Cubicles

On Sunday, September 11, Hammer was part of a three-person team working a row of stalls in Barn 2. Her teammates were Gregg and Vickie Russell, a young married couple from Atlanta that surrendered their vacation to a North Carolina beach to care for the four-legged victims of Katrina in swampy south Louisiana.

One of the team's stalls was C-39, a secure, heavy-metal enclosure with tall gray walls and all the personality of a government cubicle. Four black wire cages and one cream-colored crate squatted on a layer of wood shavings that covered the floor. Another crate rested atop one of the wire cages. In the corner of the stall, an oscillating fan distributed a little cool breeze to these furry charges.

According to the note taped to the stall door, the long-hair Dachshund in C-39 was occupying a wire cage far too large for him. The tiny pooch could easily be moved to a small crate, the note directed. The solution to this housing dilemma stared Vickie Russell right in the face as soon as she returned from walking a pit bull terrier mix, whose swollen teats suggested she had been a nursing mother before her rescue. Vickie decided to switch the Dachshund with the pit bull mix mother, whose cramped mid-size crate offered her limited mobility and comfort, even without her pups.

But before the switch could be made, Gregg Russell had a mess to clean up—the one in the terrier's crate. He carefully picked up the crate, the door side facing up so that the offending waste settled to the bottom, and walked the carrier to the cleaning area, where the feces could be safely drained into the sewer. When Gregg returned, his wife placed the Dachshund in the smaller crate and included a stuffed seahorse toy for the dog's amusement. The pint-size pooch didn't utter a single complaint about his downsized accommodations.

Mary Hammer made sure to switch the paperwork on the two cages, doing her best to to avoid confusion, frustration and potential heartache as the dogs move separately through the system. Marta Diffen, a director from the Michigan Humane Society and one of Barn 2's leaders, gave her blessing to the switch.

No sooner had the Dachshund been placed in his new digs, however, than Vickie noticed that the dog apparently had no official documentation, only a sheet of notebook paper on which volunteers checked off the tasks required for each animal: a walk, water, food, and a bath. Just as quickly, Vickie noticed the Dachshund sported a collar with an ID and a rabies tag. She read off the information from those tags to Diffen, who recorded it for input into the animal database.

And just like that, these volunteers from opposite sides of the country had not only made one mother dog more comfortable, but potentially saved another animal from being lost in the system for days. They were, in other words, not just volunteers, but a valuable backup system in themselves—providing an extra set of eyes to help accomplish the challenging goal of this entire operation: to reunite owner with animal.

So what do Mary Hammer and Gregg and Vickie Russell get out of this?

On the surface, they get nothing. No compensation. No perks. But dig a little deeper, and you learn that they get plenty: Hammer gets to rest easier again; the wildlife biologist says she couldn't sleep at night thinking about the suffering animals in New Orleans.

And Vickie and Gregg Russell may get a chance to play the town crier to the global village. The couple both work at CNN—she as a producer and he as a writer—and Vickie in particular hopes to use whatever influence she has at the news channel to let the world know about those victims of Katrina who can't talk into the microphone themselves, who can't explain their anguish in ways we understand.

As Vickie explains her desire to bring post-Katrina animal stories to her viewers, she's wearing a CNN baseball cap, with the catchphrase, "Make a Difference," stitched across the front.

She clearly must know that she's already making a difference here, with or without a microphone and camera.

Tim Carman is managing editor of hsus.org.