When it rains on cats and dogs…

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!”

LAT-WP