Shaggy survivors hanging on after Katrina

A man's best friend
Then he recounts the story of a Vietnam veteran, a double amputee, who had hung onto a tree with his dog, an apricot standard Poodle named Morgan Le Fay, after the Arthurian enchantress. Eventually, he managed to make it onto the roof of his house, with the dog, but when he was evacuated by helicopter, he was forced to leave Morgan behind.

“By good fortune, we picked up the dog later, but had no idea where he was,” Mountain says. “Volunteers around the country started e-mailing each other and doing searches and they discovered that the guy was at a hospital in Miami, Fla., so a couple of them drove the dog down there. For this guy, this dog is really all he has.”

Another resourceful Vietnam veteran, Gary Karcher, shared his home in New Orleans with a young Rottweiler and a pair of Dachshunds. Deciding after the flooding that he had to try to make his way to the VA hospital and knowing he didn’t have any way of bringing the dogs with him, he emptied his water heater, put food everywhere, and wrote out a message about his Rottweiler’s need for eye medication.

“He put this in a bottle to keep it safe from the water and tied the bottle around the dog’s neck, along with the eye medication,” Mountain says. “A couple of days later, we picked up the Rottweiler and the Dachshunds, which had gotten outdoors, separately, not knowing they had anything to do with each other.”

Karcher was tracked down to a camp in Oklahoma and notified that his Rottweiler was safe. He asked if by chance his Dachshunds had been rescued as well. The reunion of the four has been hampered, however, by FEMA’s no-pets policy.

“Gary is going to be getting or may already have a mobile home from FEMA,” Mountain says, “but they have one of those no-pets rules, so he can’t take the dogs back at this point. We’ll be hanging onto his dogs until he can get out of the trailer and make other arrangements. Will we be sticking to the three-months-foster-and-then-adoption rule? In this case, absolutely not. We’ll hold the dogs for as long as it takes for Gary to be in a position to take them back.”

Keeping people and their pets united
It’s a cliché that every cloud has a silver lining. If that’s true, Katrina’s cloud ought to be made entirely of sterling silver.

The response to hurricanes Rita and Wilma, which closely followed Katrina, saw better coordination between agencies to allow for evacuation with pets. Both Texas and Florida set up shelters that permitted pets.

And Congressmen Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) and Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) have introduced legislation to ensure that in any future disasters people will not be separated from their pets.

“There are a lot of issues to be worked out, but one of the big things we’ve seen from Katrina is that people will not evacuate when they can’t take their pets,” says veterinarian Rebecca Adcock, a spokesperson for the Louisiana Veterinary Medical Association. “We can probably attribute a lot of loss of life, human and animal, to that fact and we need to take that into account.”

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