Animal welfare professionals, like emergency room employees, are part of a rare segment of society accustomed to responding to an endless stream of crises. In the face of the largest natural disaster in the nation’s history, staff and volunteers of local organizations combined spontaneous creativity with seasoned experience to care for thousands of animals in dire need.

Courtesy Humane Society SPCA of Bexar County After being rescued from an attic and transported to Texas, a New Orleans evacuee and her dog enjoyed daily visits together at the Humane Society SPCA of Bexar County in San Antonio.

They had already traveled to Houston, New Orleans, Lafayette, and Gonzales. They had taken in pets from Baton Rouge Animal Control, the Houston SPCA, and other shelters along the Gulf Coast that were forced to evacuate during Hurricane Katrina. They had worked at the Red Cross’s emergency site in their own Texas town to meet up with evacuees who’d smuggled animals in their purses, shoe boxes, and suitcases. They had helped rescue 700 animals from dangerous floodwaters in the Big Easy, bathed and fed hundreds more at their shelter back in San Antonio, and—within one week of Katrina’s landfall—reunited more than 30 animals with owners who’d been relocated to California, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Georgia.

But it wasn’t over yet. Just when the staff and volunteers of the Humane Society SPCA of Bexar County thought they’d been stretched to the breaking point, forecasters began to predict that Hurricane Rita was headed straight for Houston—and the evacuation cycle began again. This time, however, one of the other partnering shelters in San Antonio was crying uncle; it had already taken in 400 evacuated pets and couldn’t take any more.

It was September 21, and the line of animals was 50-deep outside the front door of the Humane Society. San Antonio officials made an emergency call to Washington, D.C., to see if the local Kelly Air Force Base could spare a warehouse overnight for the overflow of animals—at least until the private shelter could increase its own accommodations.

It was, in the words of Humane Society executive director Kathryn Bice, a “meltdown.”

“My staff kept coming down the hall and they’d say, ‘Can we stop taking them now?’ I’d say, ‘No,’ ” Bice recalls with the kind of joviality that comes from the relief of surviving a crisis. “They’d say, ‘Can we close now?’ I’d say, ‘Noooooooo.’ And then the animals were stacked too high everywhere, and they filled my office with 30 cats and said, ‘Now can we stop?’ ”

But stopping was not an option. There was simply no place else for the furred and feathered hurricane victims to go.

Normally a limited-intake facility that handles 300 animals at a time and places about 130 a week into new homes, the Humane Society SPCA of Bexar County provided refuge for more than 1,500 animals in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

“We just had so many, it was just unbelievable,” says Bice. “If we were counting, we’d have run screaming from the building.”

Right at the breaking point, the ASPCA called to ask what they could do to help. “They said, ‘How about if we send a check?’ And that’s when we got our first $50,000 contribution,” says Bice. “And that’s what enabled me to rent four or five vans and buy out all the crates in San Antonio and move forward.”

The Humane Society SPCA of Bexar County received financial support and deliveries of supplies from around the country and even from international donors. Community members stepped up to help with the grunt work, walking dogs and cleaning crates and doing laundry at all hours of the day and night. Some were well-known to the shelter—like the members of the San Antonio Dog Training Club who made care sheets for every animal’s crate and canceled some of their regular operations to be there each day—and others were new to the organization. “When I sent out thank-you letters, there were over 300 people that we hadn’t ever had in our database that came in and helped,” says Bice.

Since so many of the animals being housed in the shelter were owned by people who’d evacuated to San Antonio, pet owners inundated the facility with phone calls and visits. Using armbands that enabled them to travel on city buses for free, some evacuees came to visit each day—including one family rescued by a boater who’d tried to save his father but had found him dead in his home. After catching a glimpse of a hand waving an Easter bunny decoration from a rooftop vent, the man saved three generations of women, along with two dogs who couldn’t contain their joy whenever the women came to visit them at Bice’s shelter.

“One little dog was running in circles,” Bice says. “He’d kiss [one woman’s] neck and her face, and then he’d run in circles and do a flip and he’d come back and kiss her neck some more, and she was just sitting in the grass laughing and hugging him.”

The Humane Society served not only as a refuge for the animal evacuees but as a place of solace and therapy for their human families. Officials had initially told Bice and her staff that no pets would be arriving on the evacuee-filled buses and planes heading into San Antonio on September 2, but the shelter staff knew better. A phone call from Patti Mercer of the Houston SPCA at 9 p.m. the night before had prepared them for what was to come: exhausted, dehydrated people hanging onto their pets for dear life. Over the ensuing weeks, staff and volunteers bore witness to the suffering of hundreds of evacuees and spent countless hours reassuring them that, even though there was much wrong with the world, at least their pets were in a safe and loving place.

One pet owner who’d been in the middle of cancer treatments when Katrina hit had to spend weeks in a San Antonio hospital. His wife held vigil by his side and phoned Bice periodically for updates on the couple’s two cockatiels, Popcorn and Angel.

When the couple was finally able to leave with the birds and join their daughter in Dallas, the birds’ own separation anxieties became apparent. “When they saw her … the bird started saying, ‘Hi pretty lady! Hi pretty lady!’” says Bice. “And the one bird who’d been very sedate the whole time stuck his head through the bars and was trying to squeeze his whole body through. That bird knew her and wanted to just get up as close to her as he could.”

Caring for the People Who Care for Animals

During the longest six weeks of the disaster, nobody on the 41-person staff took any vacation or sick leave; many were working 20, 30, even 40 hours straight. In the end, all received a monetary “hurricane bonus” for their efforts.

“We learned that we’re going to have to pace ourselves when we do those things,” says Bice. “Everybody worked until they dropped instead of splitting the shifts by 12 hours or shutting down for eight hours in the middle of the night so that people could sleep. Because we didn’t stop—we never stopped.”

At the same time that Bice tries to envision a more sane, humane work schedule for everyone during the next crisis, she falters midthought and wonders how, really, she and her staff could have stopped themselves last September. The flood of people escaping New Orleans was too overwhelming; those people and their pets needed the shelter’s support and they needed it immediately.

It’s a common problem in any disaster: There are always so many things to do at once and never enough people to do them. At the San Diego Humane Society & SPCA in California, managers who had overseen the removal of 3,000 animals from homes during the 2003 fires foresaw the need for a little caretaking of staff in advance of the Katrina response. Before deploying members of its Animal Rescue Reserve team to Louisiana, the organization brought in a counselor to discuss coping strategies.

As someone who also works with military personnel suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders, the counselor knew what the team would be facing and discussed issues such as the importance of rest and mutual support—and the likelihood that everyone, at some point, would experience feelings of emotional weakness.

The sessions proved invaluable to the 31 people who traveled to New Orleans to rescue animals and help run Barn 5 at the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center over the course of the next few weeks, says president Mark Goldstein. The combination of the sweltering heat, the living arrangements, and the overwhelming numbers meant that “somewhere between 48 and 72 hours, pretty much everybody had a meltdown,” he says.

“We found that they could turn to a team member and lean on their shoulder because we and the counselor had already made them aware that it’s okay to feel like that,” says Goldstein, “that it’s actually weaker to hide your feelings than it is to let them out at that point. So then we found that they bounced back.”

Though the organization tried to mandate a day off in the middle of each staff member’s two-week tour of duty, “sometimes it occurred and sometimes it didn’t,” says Goldstein. But at least his staff had been provided with the tools to help them cope. When field responders accompanied FBI agents into homes of deceased humans to search for animals, they were able to fall back on one of the organization’s mantras during the disaster: Focus on the mission to reduce suffering and save animal lives. And that’s not to imply that animal welfare professionals shouldn’t care about the people, says Goldstein—just that, at the same time that the Red Cross and other rescuers of human victims had a job to do, the animal welfare experts needed to focus on the tasks they could best help with.

“You obviously, at that point, had to step back,” says Goldstein, “and say, ‘I can deal with this. I can have an impact. I’m not going to save every life, I’m not going to save every person. I can’t make this all good, but I can have an impact.’ ”

While some SDHS staff and volunteers were toiling away far from home, others worked hard to fill the gaps back in California—and also called the families of those in the field at least twice during the two-week period to let them know their loved ones were safe. It was all part of the shelter’s efforts to ensure that its people were being nurtured and cared for.

© San Diego Humane Society and SPCA Before deploying Tony Sawyer and other members of its Animal Rescue Reserve to Louisiana, the San Diego Humane Society brought in a counselor to prepare them for what they were about to see.

“You cannot be successful with this if you don’t take care of your people,” says Goldstein. “And I’ll be quite frank: I see this changing dramatically, but I think too long in this industry we sort of thought people should be lucky to be in this line of work. Which we are! But we sort of are so compassionate to animals … sometimes at the expense of our staff and the volunteers that work with them.”

Tapping Into Foster Networks

Compassion for all species went hand in hand for many organizations responding to the disaster— but was particularly apparent in the SPCA of Central Florida’s reunion efforts. When two dogs had to be sent to Minneapolis to be reunited with their family there, the Orlando shelter needed to send two staff members to accompany them on the plane, says marketing and management information systems director Jake White. It just so happened that a married couple on staff desperately needed some time off; Hurricane Charley had wiped out their trailer home in 2004.

“They hadn’t had a vacation in a year and a half because everything they’ve been doing—all their money—is going back to trying to rebuild their lives,” says White. “So when our executive director actually purchased the tickets for them to go to Minnesota and flew them up there with the animals and got them a place to stay—oh, wouldn’t you know? We made a ‘mistake’ and they had to stay there for a couple days because we bought the tickets for the ‘wrong’ dates. So we treated them to a little extra vacation.”

As Florida residents, the staff of the SPCA of Central Florida already have more years of hurricane-relief experience than they would care to count. Through an existing program called F.A.S.T. Help (Florida Animal Sheltering Team), which assists shelters in distress, the SPCA also has the infrastructure in place to handle a major influx of hungry, tired, and sick animals.

Often those animals are homeless dogs and cats who can be adopted out, but because of the nature of this disaster, many of the SPCA’s 461 hurricane charges were owned pets. Some were even dropped off by evacuees staying in the area. To accommodate the long-term holding needs of these animals, the SPCA made creative use of another existing program, Project F.A.I.T.H. (Fostering Animals in Temporary Homes). Designed to house pets of domestic violence victims in undisclosed locations, the Project F.A.I.T.H. network served a dual-purpose last fall by becoming a fostering resource for victims of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.

The program was a lifesaver for families like the Vosses, who had evacuated to a relative’s home in Orlando but had no safe spot for their cat, Sam, to stay.

The SPCA took in the Vosses’ furriest family member, but the journey had proven hard on the cat, who also became severely stressed by the separation.

“He got a serious case of URI,” says Ellen Rosette, a foster volunteer at the shelter. “I administered antibiotics and fed him liquids with a syringe for six days before he began to eat and drink. His breathing was so bad I nicknamed him ‘Darth Vader.’ By the time he was reunited with his family, I just called him ‘Juicy Nose’—[that] got a giggle from the kids in the family.”

© San Diego Humane Society and SPCA Many of the 31 people sent to Louisiana by the San Diego Humane Society helped care for animals at Lamar-Dixon.

The reunion took place when the family decided to head back to New Orleans to try to rebuild their home, which had been destroyed. “I could not believe how elated Sam was to see them,” says Rosette. “He liked me, but it was obvious he loved them.”

While Sam had been friendly with Rosette, he’d been somewhat subdued and selective about when and how long she could hold him. When he was reunited with his family, however, he was “positively exuberant,” says Rosette, and wanted to be picked up and nuzzled. “He was especially like that with the little girl; he let her hold him in any awkward position she could manage. His walk was also more confident, assured, and free-ranging around them. It’s hard to describe, but he really became a different cat.”

Creating New Foster Networks

Most of the creatures who ended up in shelters across the country last fall had gone even further afield than Sam did—sometimes thousands of miles from home with no signs of ever seeing their families again. While the organizations that took in furred and feathered hurricane evacuees report being stunned by the animals’ resilience in the face of such trauma, they still had a conundrum on their hands: how to make enough space and time for the longer-term residents, who are always in danger of going stir-crazy when cooped up for too many months.

The Dumb Friends League is used to taking in animals from other facilities through its Pet Connection program, but those animals can usually be placed up for adoption fairly quickly. The little critters of New Orleans, on the other hand, were in for a very long stay. The Denver, Colorado, facility took in 139 of them, keeping 82 and passing on 57 to the Humane Society of Boulder Valley. Most were potentially owned.

A staff member offered a solution. Wouldn’t it be neat, he asked his colleagues, if each animal had one person who could act as a “sponsor” of sorts? Someone to walk, hold, and play with her every day during the duration of her stay?

Soon all the Katrina animals at the Dumb Friends League had at least one staff member or volunteer spending lunches and breaks with them. In addition to providing creature comforts, the sponsors helped monitor the animals’ physical health by weighing their charges every day. Whenever one of the animals demonstrated food aggression or housetraining issues, sponsors were also able to employ behavior modification techniques.

© SPCA of Central Florida Sam let his guard down and became “a different cat” during his reunion with the Voss family, says Ellen Rosette, a volunteer for the SPCA of Central Florida (pictured with the family above).

“Some of our sponsors were operations folks, some of them were from our support departments such as Accounting,” says Tara Hall, the shelter’s director of operations. “Everybody got involved, and their task was to give these guys a little something extra.”

The Dumb Friends League was heavily involved in many aspects of the disaster, sending staff to the Gulf Coast to help care for rescued animals and fielding hundreds, if not thousands, of phone calls from Katrina victims in search of their animals. “Everybody hurt for the victims of Katrina,” says Hall. “We knew we were helping by having the animals here, but the sponsor program gave everybody kind of an opportunity to really make it specific to them.”

One in-house sponsor, a 20-year veteran of the organization named Gloria, fell so in love with her Katrina animal (known to staff as “Cinnamon”) that she decided to adopt the chow-shepherd mix at the end of the three-month holding period. The staff at the Dumb Friends League were struck by “how singularly this dog attached,” blossoming only in Gloria’s presence, Hall says.

In early December, the shelter received a call from a woman named Karen who had seen the dog on Petfinder. The dog had few distinguishing characteristics—in fact, she was the spitting image of the shelter everymutt—but the caller was unequivocal: this was definitely her Sheba.

To find out for sure, Hall and her staff decided to fly Karen to Denver. For her part, Gloria was apprehensive. “She was really in a very bittersweet place of wanting to do the very best thing for the dog,” says Hall, “but not really sure what that was going to end up being.”

To avoid confusing the dog, Gloria stood outside and peered through a window of the room where woman and beast were to meet.

“And we opened the door to the obedience room, and I was standing there with Karen, and she turned to the door and [sucked in her breath and yelled] ‘Sheeeeeba!!!’ ” says Hall. “And the dog clicked on. … This dog went from unaffected to ‘Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello! I’ve missed you!’ It’s impossible to capture the moment in words, and I’ll never forget it as long as I live.”

Gloria was instantly at peace. Her anxieties about the dog formerly known as Cinnamon vanished.

Since Katrina, the Dumb Friends League has decided to make the sponsorship program a permanent feature of its regular operations. Though they already have what they refer to as an “in-house fostering program” for sick, nursing, or less socialized animals, it’s all the staff can do to keep up with just cleaning, feeding, and treating them.

“But by bringing back what we’ve learned from the Katrina sponsorship program, we’re going to be able to better enrich those animals’ lives,” says Hall. “So maybe somebody who works in Accounting might have two puppies for a playgroup running around their office while they’re getting their monthly statements put together. Or … maybe we have a litter of kittens and somebody’s coming down to the foster area once a day and picking up every kitten in the litter and weighing it and giving it some snuggle time and some one-on-one attention.”

“It gives them extra TLC,” says Hall, “but we learn so much more about them so that when they do go up for adoption now, we’ve got a whole history on them.”