Pet project

BY CATHY SCOTT

"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be measured by the way in which its animals are treated." Mahatma Gandhi

TYLERTOWN, MISS -- It's 7 a.m. in Tylertown and the 40-some volunteers are starting their day, with a handful preparing to leave for New Orleans to round up animal victims left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Other volunteers have already started feeding and watering the hundreds of dogs and cats whose care is now their job.

Welcome to the Best Friends/St. Francis Hurricane Relief Center, where about 1,500 dogs and cats and even a few iguana, geese, pigs and fish have come through the sanctuary. Some have already been reunited with their owners; others have been sent to foster homes until their owners can be found. Others still have just recently been rescued.

I left for Mississippi on Sept. 9. Five weeks later, I'm still here. No one thought that more than 40 days after the levee broke, pets would still be alive in apartments, houses and on the streets needing to be picked up.

Since Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast, Best Friends has been at the St. Francis Animal Sanctuary in Tylertown, about 90 miles north of New Orleans, maintaining a makeshift camp on the shelter grounds so volunteers and a handful of staffers care for and try to find the owners of the animals they've rescued from the streets of New Orleans.

Best Friends extraction teams were the first allowed by officials to go into St. Bernard Parish -- one of three main wards in the greater New Orleans area -- where the water reached the ceiling of homes and thousands of pets were stranded. Residents of the other two major parishes, Jefferson and Orleans, were also forced to leave their pets behind.

On one trip to the city with rescue teams to New Orleans, I was hit with the stark reality that the city had become a ghost town inhabited only by the dogs, cats and miscellaneous pets still waiting to be rescued.

Three days after I arrived, I tagged along with a rescue crew, passing the scrutiny of three checkpoints that included law enforcement officers and National Guard soldiers. We drove along the Causeway, where hundreds of people had earlier been stranded. The refugees were gone, but their trash and belongings were still there. We drove along the interstate to Elysian Fields Avenue. The offramp became a boat launch.

The silence was deafening. No birds were chirping. No car engines could be heard. Our voices echoed as we spoke to each other. The stench from the water full of urban debris was profound. I boarded a boat and we rowed into a neighborhood. We stopped and sat perfectly still. We didn't hear anything. We waited a few minutes, then one rescuer started mocking a bark. That's when we heard a faint meow from a porch and a loud bark from a back yard.

We ended up rescuing two cats and one dog from that street.

Also picked up that day was a standard-size poodle stranded on a rooftop. Her owner, William Morgan, later located his dog in Tylertown. As the water rose to the ceiling of his home, Morgan told me in a telephone interview that he broke through the roof, then pulled his dog, Morgan LeFay, up with him.

Morgan, a double amputee, held onto a tree for three hours as the wind and rain slapped his body. When a helicopter crew arrived to rescue him, they refused to take LeFay with them. He was forced to leave her on the roof.

Later, when Best Friends rescuers Ethan Gurney and Jeff Popowich spotted the dog standing on the roof, she was so frightened she jumped into the watery muck. Popowich and Gurney got her out and took her to Tylertown.

On Oct. 4, LeFay and Morgan were reunited in Miami, Fla., where he was recovering from the experience. A social worker is fostering his dog until Morgan gets a place of his own.

During another trip to New Orleans, this time to St. Bernard Parish near a high school, Best Friends photographer and former Marine Clay Meyers and Cincinnati resident Mike McCleese rescued an emaciated 7-pound toy poodle, who was huddled next to a broken flower pot and chain-link fence. Meyers appeared overcome by the enormity of the event as the dog crashed in the back of a van. Volunteer veterinary technician Susan Thomas (with the Ashtabula, Ohio Animal Protective League) jumped into the van and hooked up the dog to an IV. The poodle was also taken to the Tylertown sanctuary, where Dr. Pema Chodron -- a Buddhist nun and homeopathic veterinarian -- was volunteering at the clinic that's dubbed the "M.A.S.H. unit."

One volunteer, retired Seattle bank owner Bob Richards, described the M.A.S.H. unit and the rest of the Tylertown sanctuary as "a mini city."

After seeing dogs and cats arrive with rescuers several evenings in a row, Richards said, "The dogs respond to it. After a few days with the volunteers here, they come back to life."

And that's why I'm still here.