NEW ORLEANS — Peter Block was waiting patiently for an emergency bus to Baton Rouge with his two black Great Danes, Venus and Serena, and Jasmine, a border collie mix.
Half his house, near the 17th Street Canal, was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, Block said. The rest was swept away when a levee broke.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday September 10, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 86 words Type of Material: Correction
Stranded pets -- An article in Thursday's Section A about pets left behind in New Orleans by hurricane evacuees said the Humane Society of the United States had about 250 people in the area, "including workers from the Los Angeles chapter of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals." The SPCA Los Angeles, like other SPCA groups, is not a chapter of the ASPCA. SPCA Los Angeles operates independently. It is also not a part of the Humane Society of the United States.
In recent months, Block's father and two sisters died of cancer. Now, with $116 in his pocket, Block is hoping to start a new life somewhere else with his dogs.
"It's what I live for," Block said as he nuzzled and petted his three canines. "My girls."
These are tough times in the Crescent City for both man and beast. Though Katrina's floodwaters are slowly receding, the storm and its ruinous aftermath have turned even the simplest tasks -- getting some sleep, scrounging a meal not tainted with E. coli bacteria -- into Herculean labors.
That's as true for the thousands of human survivors who still haven't fled their ravaged city as it is for the hundreds of dogs, cats, birds, reptiles and other pets that have been left behind to fend for themselves. Some are still grimly hanging onto life. They sit forlornly on the rooftops of flooded homes, slowly starving to death as rescuers in boats ignore them, looking for people instead. Some have even tried swimming to boats, only to be rebuffed.
Many other pets didn't make it, and their bodies now lie in pools of scummy water or by the side of highways. Even those lucky animals whose owners refused to part with them, come hell or high water, have been suffering right alongside their masters.
Like so many of the problems in this frazzled city, the scale of the abandoned-animal crisis caught even experienced players off guard.
"It was obviously worse than anyone imagined," Wayne Pacelle, president and chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, the nation's largest animal-welfare group, said in a phone interview from Washington.
The society has about 250 workers in the storm-hit area "as part of a team that we're controlling," including workers from the Los Angeles chapter of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Oregon Humane Society and other organizations, Pacelle said.
"We were on the ground Tuesday, the day after the hurricane hit, but we were excluded from going in by state and federal authorities for the first several days," Pacelle said. "We've received 2,000 e-mails and phone calls from people who evacuated from New Orleans, who left animals in their homes and are pleading with us to rescue them. That's just in New Orleans. It doesn't count surrounding areas."
