Helping furry friends

WASHINGTON – Jason Wesley has always considered herself a sensible woman, the kind who keeps flashlights and bottled water handy – just in case. But she never thought that instinct would one day lead her to the floor of a veterinarian’s office, giving mouth-to-mouth to a fake dog.

That’s where she ended up after Hurricane Katrina, enrolled in a pet first aid class. Thinking of her puppy at home, she put her mouth to the plastic snout and began to blow.

This is the emerging field of disaster planning for pets, filled with doomsday scenarios, four-legged victims and people who love them.

For years, despite an estimated 69 million U.S. households with a pet, animal advocates have been relegated to the fringes of emergency planning. After Katrina, however, and the sight of people in New Orleans refusing to evacuate and in some cases dying with their pets, emergency officials are starting to take animal rescue seriously.

By saving the pets, advocates said, owners can be saved as well.

On Capitol Hill, five representatives have proposed making pet disaster planning mandatory by tying it to federal funds. Meanwhile, many pet owners have begun to make plans.

“People are finally realizing that this is a serious issue,” said Lynne Bettinger, a Red Cross-certified instructor in pet first aid.

The concept is as old as Noah’s Ark, but modern pet disaster planning didn’t truly begin, U.S. experts said, until after Hurricane Andrew in 1992. When Andrew tore through South Florida, it killed more than 100 animals in the Miami Metrozoo. Hundreds of others, including baboons, antelope and 500-pound Galapagos tortoises, wandered off through the rubble. Escaped horses drowned in canals.

“For the first time, people saw this happening on TV,” said Oliver Davidson, senior disaster adviser for the Humane Society of the United States. “It was like the launching pad for awareness of the issue.”

After Andrew, the federal government created Veterinary Medical Assistance Teams to be deployed wherever animal-threatening disasters hit. The 1992 hurricane also prompted the Humane Society to establish a department devoted to disaster planning and rescue.

Davidson was one of the people the Humane Society recruited. For 20 years, he had coordinated U.S. assistance after foreign catastrophes. But after working 320 disasters, he left his federal post to address what he saw as a gaping hole in the field.

“When I first started this job, I would take my brochures and planning documents to all the emergency management meetings,” Davidson said. Some attendees listened politely, a few made jokes and most dismissed his work as trivial. “They would say, ‘Well, we know it’s a possible problem, but frankly, the threat is not that high.’ “

Until Hurricane Katrina

Katrina killed more than 1,000 people in the Gulf region. It is unknown how many animals died, state and local officials said. Also unknown, they said, is the number of people who died because they stayed with their pets.

TV coverage showed residents who had stayed with their pets stranded on rooftops. Many said they stayed because shelters, including those operated by the Red Cross, didn’t allow pets because of health and safety reasons. Federal and state rescuers, whose focus was on saving humans, forced residents to leave behind their animals.

“But people refused to be rescued without their pets,” said Terry Kane, a veterinarian deployed to New Orleans by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”It created a disaster within a disaster.”

New Orleans’ animal control and rescue groups set up a staging area at the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center near Gonzales, La., where they handled about 8,500 rescued animals. Louisiana State University also opened a shelter where evacuees could leave pets at its coliseum in Baton Rouge.

“There was a plan, but not for something on this level,” said David Senior, head of LSU’s veterinary clinical sciences. “It was a pretty steep learning curve.”

Floodwaters destroyed the animal control building in Orleans Parish and forced many animal control officers to evacuate. Authorities began deputizing volunteers to help, but lack of expertise led to problems.

“There were complaints from people sitting in their living room having dinner, and rescue workers just crowbarred through their door looking for pets,” Senior said.

FEMA activated all four of its veterinary units, making it what the agency called the largest simultaneous deployment of veterinary relief in U.S. history — more than 200 veterinarians.

But the veterinary teams were ill-equipped because of FEMA’s policies, team members said. FEMA forbids veterinarians from using their own equipment, accepting donations or buying supplies. In the end, many teams said they had to break FEMA’s rules to save animals.

“We didn’t have fluids, antibiotics, euthanasia fluid, not even boots and rubber gloves for the toxic water,” said Barry Kellogg, deputy commander of one team.

In the following months, animal groups were inundated with requests for preparedness guides and seminars. The Humane Society’s list of volunteers for disasters swelled from about 200 before Katrina into the thousands. The nonprofit organization raised more than $23 million in hurricane relief and used it to send teams to the Gulf region with new laptops, satellite phones and trailers.

“Katrina has changed things like nothing else,” Davidson said. “It’s pushed the issue to a level we’ve never seen, even with Hurricane Andrew.”

Weeks after Katrina, as Hurricane Rita approached Texas, officials suspended rules that banned pets from shelters, saying they had learned from Katrina.