Mark Percy said he thought he had seen a
ghost when he pushed open the flood-swollen
door of his parents' home in eastern New
Orleans and encountered the family's black
cocker spaniel, Sabu.
The dog was still alive despite being
entombed in the dank, moldy ranch house for
more than five weeks. Sabu had been stashed
in the attic at the onset of the flooding,
but in the intervening days, he had fallen
through the damp ceiling onto the ground
floor. "He scared me to death," said Percy,
20, marveling at the emaciated creature that
rolled in the dry grass and lapped pellets
of kibble from the sidewalk. "He's a
soldier. At best, I thought somebody got
him. I thought he'd be dead."
The somebody that Percy hoped would have
gotten the trapped dog was one of the
hundreds of animal rescuers from across the
country who wandered New Orleans in the days
and weeks after Hurricane Katrina, checking
lists of pet-owner addresses, listening for
barks, looking for furred faces in windows
and otherwise searching for trapped animals.
Their hand-marked vehicles, crowbar house
break-ins and caged survivors were a
leitmotif of the storm and flood's
aftermath.
But though animal rescues continued this
week in largely empty neighborhoods, and
though the resilience of domesticated
animals -- from house cats to lap dogs to
exotic birds -- was sometimes astonishing,
time was no longer on their side.
Amanda St. John, the founder of
Muttshack, a volunteer rescue organization
based in Los Angeles, said the condition of
the animals being brought to Muttshack's
Hayne Boulevard headquarters in Lake Castle
Private School had deteriorated since the
first weeks of the rescue. Predictably, the
animals were becoming "skinnier and sicker
and quieter."
"A lot of homeowners are coming home to
dead and dying animals," she said.
The disposition of the animals had also
changed. Gone were the gregarious dogs
prancing toward their rescuers, replaced by
sullen frightened creatures who had begun
adapting to life on the street. Cages in the
rescuer's canine compound were marked with
red labels designating animals too hostile
to handle.
One recent afternoon, Karen O'Toole of
Chicago and Nancy Cleveland of Los Angeles,
two of Muttshack's most dedicated rescuers,
cruised the gray junk-strewn New Orleans
neighborhoods -- neighborhoods that were
sometimes disheveled even before Katrina --
conducting still another stray cat sweep. As
their white van lurched from place to place,
braking abruptly at any sign of life, they
tore open small packages of pet food,
tossing them from the moving vehicle like
beads from a Mardi Gras float. The two
women's hands were punctured and scratched
from handling cats.
"Now we're seeing strays everywhere,"
O'Toole said. "Whether their owners were
told to leave them off or if they were
released when the owners evacuated, there
are poodles to pit bulls running loose. In a
normal city, a stray can rummage through the
garbage at a restaurant or convenience
store, but here there's nothing. We put out
food everywhere, but there's a handful of
us, we can't rescue a city of pets."
In the course of a few hours, O'Toole and
Cleveland collected four stray cats from t
cages that had been set and tried
unsuccessfully to coax a wary dog toward
them on Ursuline Street. John Williams, a
neighbor watching the scene, said the dog
looked "like a damn hyena." But that furtive
stray seemed tame compared to the pair of
wildly barking pit bulls on Gov. Nicholls
Street. Too violent to safely noose, they
were fed in place.
"Animals act differently now," O'Toole
said, "not because they're mean but because
they're scared. Cute little poodles will
tear your head off."
To emphasize the grimness of the
situation, the women broke from the hunt
from time to time to give macabre tours of
houses and yards where, despite their
efforts, animals have perished. A chow in
the Lafitte public housing development
seemed to have melted into the rug where he
starved to death. A mummified pit bull
hanged from his leash on an eastern New
Orleans fence where he may have strangled as
flood waters receded. A cat skeleton peeked
from beneath a pile of rubble. The rescuers
recall a small dog, alive but too weak to
move, that had presumably been put out with
the trash in front of a home. Another dog,
found in a bathroom, barely had the strength
to raise its head to greet rescuers.
"This is an animal holocaust," Cleveland
said.
Some pets abandoned
Though the ad hoc animal rescue operation
that saved the lives of thousands of pets in
the weeks after Katrina is a humanitarian
success, controversy simmers around the
zealotry of some of the rescuers, who
blithely broke into homes to save animals
they felt were in jeopardy, regardless of
whether they had been contacted by animal
owners. O'Toole and Cleveland believe the
lives of the animals outweighed the rights
of the owners.
"I thought when they opened the city,
people would rush back to get their pets,"
O'Toole said, "but some people have just
abandoned them. We were told to no longer be
going into people's residences as of last
Wednesday, but we're working in
neighborhoods where the houses are
condemned."
As an example of their approach,
Cleveland and O'Toole mentioned breaking
into every apartment in a complex in eastern
New Orleans that they believed had been
abandoned and doomed to demolition. O'Toole
said she had learned to divine the presence
of dogs and cats by certain exterior clues.
If she saw a dog figurine in a window, she
would search for a dog. If a house had an
abundance of house plants or decoration, she
would suspect a cat.
"I've never felt bad about breaking a
window once," said O'Toole.
Back at the Hayne Boulevard headquarters,
a dog handler walked a terribly skinny
German shepherd on the parking lot. The
animal's head was tilted disconcertingly to
one side, the apparent result either of
chemical toxins or a severe ear infection.
He paced unsurely in tight circles.
Elsewhere on the parking lot a skeletal chow
was bathed to remove dirt and possible
pollutants. The dog had gone deaf and blind
for unknown reasons. Another chow, also
blind and rescued from beneath the same
house, lay forlornly in a cage in the
veterinary station.
"Now the animals we're seeing are much
more critical," said Muttshack veterinarian
Sabra Lucas of Troutville, Va. "We're seeing
a lot of chemical burns, skin sloughing,
emaciation, severe dehydration -- basically,
they're just starved."
No euthanasia
Despite the near-death condition of some
of the animals, the veterinarians have
euthanized none. St. John says that,
curiously, the most damaged animals are
often the first to be adopted once they've
reached evacuation sites. "Old people take
old dogs, people with heart conditions take
dogs with heart conditions, people with a
limp take dogs with a limp," she said.
Several owners have appeared at the
Muttshack compound to retrieve lost pets, or
surrender ownership, but the majority of the
animals remain unclaimed. These castaways
are cataloged, photographed and implanted
with microchips to help reunite them with
their owners, should their owners reappear,
before they're taken away to "no-kill"
shelters, then foster homes across the
country. The animal shelter at the Lamar
Dixon Expo Center in Gonzales, a clearing
house for thousands of rescued animals,
closed Oct. 10.
Even at the height of the rescue effort,
the reuniting of animals and their owners
has been a hit-or-miss endeavor, plagued by
mistaken identities, clerical errors and
miscommunication. St. John believes that
though Muttshack continues occasionally to
reunite animals with their owners, the
possibilities are becoming slimmer.
Everybody who had an animal had a lottery
ticket," she said. "If we found your dog, if
anyone found your dog, you won the lottery.
The truth is, the chances of winning are
small."
St. John expects Muttshack to remain in
New Orleans until January.
