A Lesson From Katrina: Pets Matter

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 and handed the fake dog and instructions to save it. 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.

In Calvert and Montgomery counties, planners are trying to establish emergency pet shelters alongside those for humans. 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.

At her class early last month at a Gaithersburg veterinary clinic, many students showed up with Hurricane Katrina fresh on their minds. They learned to take pets' pulses, construct makeshift muzzles and carry injured animals over long distances.

"Where are you going to go if you have to evacuate?" she asked her students. "You need to figure this kind of thing out before a disaster hits."

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.