 The
Cat's Meow
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| Issue 36, vol 4 | The Cat Finds Closure | September 19, 2005 |
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 Cat News Headlines (live news feed) |
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The Cat Finds Closure |
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Today's Music: When It Rains On Cats and Dogs
GONZALES I LOS ANGELOS: They are lethargic. Or scared, if quivering is any measure. And the really noisy ones are barking ferociously, like the brown pit-bull-looking dog who fixes his gaze on a visitor and snarls so intensely one can imagine him warning, “Get me outta here, or else!” Paula Atzenhoffer is examining them all, and holding a tissue to her nose — not from the overpowering stench of these hundreds upon hundreds of pets, but because she’s crying. She’s come here to the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center in search of her canine brood. The last she saw of them was that awful Friday after Hurricane Katrina. The police who came to rescue Atzenhoffer and her 13-year-old grandson Charles from the streets of New Orleans made them leave their beloved dogs behind: Scout the sheltie, Datsun the dachshund and the dean of this canine crew, a Boston terrier named Pepe Le Pew. Three pampered pets left to fend for themselves. Atzenhoffer carries a photo album to this emergency outdoor animal shelter. It will help her identify her dogs and prove ownership, should she find them as she walks from cage to cage amid the thick, hot air stirred by hundreds of portable fans. This reality is playing out for hundreds of other pet owners each day at this Noah’s ark of Katrina’s aftermath, and on the streets of New Orleans and other towns along the Gulf, where pets are part of the ongoing evacuation even two weeks after the storm. And they are part of the trauma many people surely still suffer. Who can forget the little boy who cried so mightily that he threw up when rescuers wrenched from his arms his dog named Snowball? “People were staying because they wouldn’t leave their animals,” says Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States, which runs the Lamar-Dixon operation. So, as rescue boats ply the rivery streets of New Orleans each day to find humans, so too do pet rescue boats. Sometimes animals and their owners are found together. Sometimes the animals are found alone and sick from drinking contaminated street water. They are brought here to Lamar-Dixon, in a small town between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. At its busiest, this facility held up to 2,000 dogs, cats, rabbits, birds and horses, along with pet mice, rats, frogs and pythons, even a boa stored inside a plastic bin wrapped with duct tape, lest the creature escape and eat some of the hamsters and ferrets nearby. A similar facility, at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, is housing more than a thousand pets. Hundreds more pets arrive at Lamar-Dixon each day, while similar numbers are dispatched to smaller shelters for longer-term care. The numbers have been so overwhelming that the Humane Society is trying to keep it to 1,300, to better offer proper interim care of ailments such as canine dysentery, infections, cuts, malnutrition and dehydration. Instead of Noah, there are some 450 workers here: vets and staffers from the national and local Humane Society groups, as well as the US Public Health Service and FEMA, along with volunteer vets and ordinary people. There have been about 200 reunions here since the center opened two days after Katrina struck, Pacelle says. Each day hundreds of people —old, young, singles, families, of all hues — arrive with hope of good news. They register, write down descriptions of their pets, if they were wearing an identification collar, perhaps even offer photos. Bafalis described one measure of how badly these animals want to be found. To gain entry to a house with a barking dog, rescuers pulled out an air conditioning unit and a dog came flying out, jumping into the arms of a rescuer. Not all pet owners simply left their animals behind, she says. In some cases, “people had taken large bags of dog food and ripped them open before they left”. But it is looking hopeless for Atzenhoffer, of Slidell. She and her grandson have walked from cage to cage for more than an hour, finding no Pepe, Scout or Datsun. She’s been to counseling for the horrors she witnessed on the streets during the flood. She says Charles, her grandson, probably needs some help, too. The day Katrina struck, she gathered Charles with the dogs at the hotel she manages. But flooding forced them out after three days. They ended up on a street corner A very ill man died right in front of them — a man whose name they did not know but who had a dachshund named Rudy. When the man died, Atzenhoffer decided to take care of his dog, too. But they had to leave Rudy behind with their own dogs. Suddenly, as she is speaking, Charles comes racing up, all red in the face and shouting, “Grandma! We found Pepe!” |
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Reprinted from The Indian Express | ||
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New Orleans Man Comes Back To City, Saves Cat |
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Ray Lambert came home for the first time since Katrina yesterday, and the first thing he did was batter frantically at his house with a sledgehammer. The front and back doors were both blocked from the inside by furniture washed up against them, and somewhere in there, in the mess and the slime and the ruins of his life, were his eight cats. "Bebe! Mamou! Anybody?" he called, poking his head into the holes he was bashing into his house. Lambert, who had been on vacation with his wife in Maryland when the hurricane hit 16 days ago, got past military checkpoints with the help of a friend who is a cop. His was the only homeowner homecoming in a post-apocalyptic scene of miles and miles of trashed houses on the deserted streets of the 9th Ward yesterday. "I'm going in," he said, smashing the glass of his front room window and climbing gingerly into the blue tract house on Keane Drive. Lambert, 56, the drummer in a successful brass band, the Storyville Stompers, immediately found his wedding picture, covered in muck but salvageable. "Oh, my wife will be so happy," he said, whistling again anxiously for his pets. He found a brass lamp his wife, Nora, had eyed in a small antique shop in the French Quarter for years and bought only a few weeks before the storm. He found his four drum kits, all ruined. "Tammy! Whiskey! Magnolia!" Lambert called, hope starting to drain from his voice. And then, from nowhere, a hysterical ball of brown fur came flying out of a dark corner and Lambert grabbed it up, weeping joyously. "Mamou! Little Mamou!" he crooned. "This is the one I felt the most guilty about leaving. She always senses when I'm going away and gives me the pitiful 'Please don't leave' look." Lambert gave the cat food and water, put her in a carrier and plunged back into the hellhole that was his house to look for the others. Down the street, another pet was alive but not so lucky. A gentle female pit bull, with bewildered, intelligent eyes, adopted a cleanup crew, clearly as starved for affection as the MREs - meals ready to eat - they fed her. "You ever see the movie 'The Day After'?" asked Mario Waterhouse, 34, a city contractor with the crew clearing debris from the front yards of the small houses on Tricou St. "This is like after the bomb hit." The deserted street was eerily silent - there are no birds left in New Orleans and even the bugs are dying from the chemical sludge everywhere - and the sound of the crew's chain saws carried far in the muggy air. "New Orleans is a city of porches, so it's so strange to see all these porches so empty," he said. "These people are scattered all over the country now." Inside the houses, the disaster's quirks were striking. In the tiny living room of 1011 Tricou, tables were overturned and a big bookcase lay tossed on its side, but a display of Mardi Gras beads still hung from the mantel and a Bible lay open on a desk as if untouched by the flood. Outside, one of Waterhouse's workers found something in a pile of debris, brushed it off and laid it reverently on the front lawn of one of the thousands of houses that may never again be occupied. It was a black plaque with gold lettering that read, "God Bless Our Home." Reprinted from New York Daily News ------------------------- We are left wondering what happened to Bebe, Tammy, Magnolia, and the others. But, a posting at BlogCritics.org, discussing the article, reveals this: "All but two cats are safe. One died and the other is still missing." |
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Reprinted from BlogCritics.org |
