Published January 13, 2015
Alabama is lending a helping hand in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The state's animal shelters have opened their doors to hundreds of pets displaced in hard-hit parts of Louisiana and Mississippi.
Teams working with The Humane Society of the United States have already rescued two-thousand pets. But animal-rights activists estimate that tens of thousands remain and have only a few more days to live without food and water.
Many of the rescued pets will be brought from a staging area in Jackson, Mississippi, to shelters in Alabama.
The famed aquarium in New Orleans is sending surviving creatures to facilities in Dallas, Galveston and Monterey, California.
The Audubon Aquarium of the Americas (search) wasn't badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
But officials say the loss of electricity and other storm impact on the complex knocked out the life-support systems.
Most of its 6,000 animals died.
But aquarium staff managed to save sea otters, penguins and other birds, some fish and a 250 lb. green sea turtle named "Midas."
Macaws, raptors and two sea lions from the Audubon Zoo (search) arrived yesterday at the Houston Zoo.
Thousands of pet owners were forced to abandon their animals in the midst of evacuation.
In one example reported last week by The Associated Press, a police officer took a dog from one little boy waiting to get on a bus in New Orleans. "Snowball! Snowball!" the boy cried, until he vomited. The policeman told a reporter he didn't know what would happen to the dog.
In the end, rescuers worked to return the dog to the boy.
As Valerie Bennett was evacuated from a New Orleans hospital, rescuers told her there was no room in the boat for her dogs. She pleaded. "I offered him my wedding ring and my mom's wedding ring," the 34-year-old nurse recalled Saturday. They wouldn't budge. She and her husband could bring only one item, and they already had a plastic tub containing the medicines her husband, a liver transplant recipient, needed to survive.
At the hospital, a doctor euthanized some animals at the request of their owners, who feared they would be abandoned and starve to death. He set up a small gas chamber out of a plastic-wrapped dog kennel.
"The bigger dogs were fighting it. Fighting the gas. It took them longer. When I saw that, I said 'I can't do it,'" said Bennett's husband, Lorne.
Valerie Bennett left her dogs with the anesthesiologist, who promised to care for about 30 staff members' pets on the roof of the hospital, Lindy Boggs Medical Center (search).
"He said he'd stay there as long as he possibly could," Valerie Bennett recalled, speaking from her husband's bedside at Atlanta's Emory University Hospital (search).
On Saturday afternoon, she said she saw a posting on a Web site called petfinder.com that said the anesthesiologist was still caring for the animals.
Louisiana State Treasurer John Kennedy, who was helping with relief efforts Saturday, said some evacuees refused to leave without their pets.
"One woman told me 'I've lost my house, my job, my car and I am not turning my dog loose to starve,'" Kennedy said.
Kennedy said he persuaded refugees to get on the bus by telling them he would have the animals taken to an exhibition center.
The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (search) picked up two cats and 15 dogs, including one Kennedy found tied up beneath the overpass next to an unopened can of dog food with a sign that read "Please take care of my dog, his name is Chucky."
The fate of pets is a huge but underappreciated cause of anguish for storm survivors, said Richard Garfield, professor of international clinical nursing at New York's Columbia University (search).
"People in shelters are worried about 'Did Fluffy get out?'" he said. "It's very distressing for people, wondering if their pets are isolated or starving."
The Bennetts had four animals, including two beloved dogs.
They moved to Slidell, La., in July when Valerie took a job at an organ transplant institute connected to Lindy Boggs. Lorne, a former paramedic, is disabled since undergoing a liver transplant in 2001.
On Saturday, as Hurricane Katrina (search) approached, both went to the hospital to help and took all four animals with them.
They fed their guinea pig and left it in its cage in a patient room. They couldn't refill its empty water bottle because the hospital's plumbing failed Sunday, they said. They poured food on the floor for the cat, but again no water.
"I just hope that they forgive me," Valerie Bennett cried.
https://www.foxnews.com/story/neighboring-states-take-pets-zoo-animals-from-la