The five little terrier-mix dogs had been left behind on Galveston Island by their owner. Alone and frightened they watched as the storm surge began to rush into their home. As the water continued its relentless rise, they jumped to the top of a table and that’s where Houston SPCA rescue teams found them trembling and whimpering in fear. The high water mark was over their heads and our rescue teams knew in their hearts that these little dogs spent most of the night swimming for their lives. But they had a strong will to live and thanks to the Houston SPCA, they also have a second chance at life.

Houston SPCA rescue teams are in a race against time to safe innocent storm victims like these who were left behind on the Island to fend for themselves. Thousands of dogs, cats, horses, puppies and kittens, birds and other pets have found a safe haven at the Houston SPCA.

Sigh.

I have five dogs.

Four are what you might call “terrier mixes.”

The looong dog, standing on the leftmost corner of the table, kind of reminds me of Ralphie, our dachshund.

In fact, the whole group kind of resembles my pack. A bit scragglier, a bit scrappier, but…I can see it. Five little runts, just like my guys and girls. Five sweet, innocent, loyal, unconditionally loving little mutts. Five friends for life. Five reasons for living.

I can barely stand leaving them alone for a few hours: while I go to dinner, to the movies, or - dog forbid - out for the day.

Hell, I feel bad when I have to crate Kaylee in the bedroom while I take a shower in the next room.

So, how does one look at those sweet little faces…and leave them, alone, knowing full well that a hurricane is fast approaching? How?

And that’s not even to mention the creature who - presumably - was “living” in the cage next to the table.

I feel like I should clarify here that, yes, sometimes elderly, disabled, and impoverished animal guardians face obstacles in evacuating with their companions. Maybe that was the case here; maybe it wasn’t. After Katrina, the importance of preparing disaster response plans for both human and non-human animals alike became readily apparent. While the evacuation plans didn’t go off without a hitch in the face of Gustav and Ike, there were plans - not to mention plenty of forewarning.

This didn’t need to happen.

Our animal friends lost everything in the storm but hope.

Please check out the Disaster Relief section of this website to see what you can do to help the victims of Hurricane Gustav and Ike. I started accumulating disaster relief alerts and resources in the days after Katrina - and I continue to update and maintain the page(s) as a tribute to the thousands of animals that needlessly perished in Hurricane Katrina, as well as the many natural and man-made disasters since.

(Photo and excerpts from Houston SPCA’s “updates from the [Hurricane Ike] frontline”; post title lifted from this Kinship Circle alert.)

—————————-

Tagged: animals animal rights animal welfare action alerts hurricane ike hurricane ike natural disaster disaster relief texas galveston pet companion animal dog canine my furbabies galveston island houston spca hspca flickr photos animal rescue

Those are the latest estimates from Myanmar, according to international NGOs. These numbers dwarf official Myanmar government figures.

If you’d like to help, CNN has a list of resources to get your started.

Not surprisingly, CNN’s link roundup focuses on human relief organizations.* As we learned through Hurricane Katrina, however, animals are hard hit by natural disasters as well. I haven’t yet received any email notifications from international animal welfare organization regarding specific disaster relief efforts they hope to undertake in Myanmar.

But according to the WSPA’s website,

A veterinary team from the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) is on stand-by in Thailand awaiting entry authority to cyclone struck Myanmar to assess and then relieve the suffering of thousands of animals that human survivors depend on for food and their livelihoods.

WSPA is receiving daily updates from The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) while preparing its rapid assessment and response team.

Philip Russell MBE, WSPA’s Director of Disaster Management, said: “No one else, Governments, humanitarian NGOs or owners have the resources to care for these animals, most of which are owned by poor impoverished families. If those that survived die, so too will the livelihoods of thousands of people.” […]

WSPA, supported by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) will assess and respond to the needs of animals.

If you’d like to make a donation to help in these relief efforts, here are links to each of the three organizations’ disaster relief funds: WSPA, IFAW and the HSUS.

I tried searching for animal welfare/rescue groups based in Myanmar, but came up linkless. If anyone out there knows of a local group in need of aid, please let us know in the comments!

As always, if I come across any additional info, I will post it on the Disaster Relief section of the website.

* And the stats, too, completely omit any mention of non-human animals. Because property can’t be dead, missing or homeless, yo!

——————–

Tagged: burma myanmar cyclone disaster relief natural disasters emergency aid animals animal rights animal welfare

UPDATE, 10/25/07:

So here’s the transcript of the show I saw:

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: And also here’s Vice President Dick Cheney apparently nodding off during a cabinet meeting as President Bush was being briefed about the California wildfires. A Cheney spokeswoman just laughed it off, saying quote, “the vice president is taking up meditation” — a funny response there, Wolf.

BLITZER: Very funny, indeed. All right, thanks very much, Brianna Keilar.

I’m starting to think that these talking heads yapyapyap not to actually report on any real news, but just because they like the sound of their own gums flapping in the vacuum they create. “Very funny indeed”? Did you even listen to your correspondent, Wolf? So not funny, is what that was.

——————————

Yawn.

BLITZER: We will get back to Southern California and the fires in a moment.

But, on our Political Ticker this Wednesday, the vice president, Dick Cheney, caught on videotape. The video was taken during a Cabinet meeting over at the White House today. The president was being briefed on the California wildfires. But check it out. Cheney appears appears — appears — to be nodding off, albeit briefly.

Wish I had the video to share, but alas, no luck.

This is actually transcript from the 4PM edition of the show; when I watched during the 7PM hour, Wolf also reported on Cheney’s secretary’s (?) reaction when a journalist pointed out Cheney’s seeming boredom at what has become a national disaster. (Paraphrasing, of course.)

He’s taken up meditation during meetings.

Ha-fucking-ha.

Really, is this their idea of a joke? A million people evacuated, 1,500 homes destroyed, 434,000 acres scorched, and you douchebags are making a funny out of Cheney’s inability to stay awake during a discussion of this very important issue?

And what really gets me is that she had a great out. Several, really. Cheney’s an old guy jacked up on who knows how many meds. Blame it on his age, blame it on the heart pills, heck, blame it on dick pills for all I care. Just don’t make a fucking joke out of what will for many people be the single worst week of their lives. That’s just evil.

Not that I should be surprised, though. Those fuckers don’t usually pretend to care, so at least they’re sticking to what they know best.

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Tagged: dick cheney cheney fires wildfires the situation room asleep on the job california california wildfires

Click here to view hundreds of past and current Hurricane Katrina (and other natural-and/or-man-made-disasters-for-non-human-animals) alerts.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Kinship Circle - kinshipcircle [at] accessus.net
Date: Aug 29, 2007 1:19 PM
Subject: When 2 Years Equal A Lifetime, AUGUST 2005-2007

Kinship Circle Animal Disaster Relief
Permission to crosspost as written

Hurricane Katrina, 8/29/05 - 8/29/07
When two years equal a lifetime
www.kinshipcircle.org/disasters/

Still Loved
Forever Missed
Never Again
By Our Side, Always

2005 GULF COAST Animal Disaster Aid - In Pictures & Words:
www.kinshipcircle.org/disasters/gulfcoast/newsletters/default05.html

PHOTO: Kinship Circle member Tim Gorski on the water in New Orleans with the Winn Dixie rescue effort in 9/05.

9/13/05, Excerpt From Early Kinship Circle Alert: In our search for Spike (the little Yorkie) we’ve learned about volunteers on the water who could save Spike and others — but they desperately need more boats!

The Jefferson Pet Feed & Garden Center is serving as a drop site for boats and has a triage center with a veterinarian. Please, if you can bring down boats — or know someone who can — call: Jefferson Pet Feed & Garden Center: 504-733-8572 (This number, like all in the area, may be hard to reach. Do not give up. They are there!)

(More below the fold…)

I had hoped to blog a bit more about Hurricane Katrina, but I’ve had a busy week. We met Gracie and Penelope on Friday, and of course decided within the first 30 seconds to adopt them. (We visited for at least an hour though, with a few rounds of belly rubs for each of ‘em.)

Unfortunately, we won’t be able to bring them home until the end of September. Next week we leave for NY - again - and will be away for a few weeks. Shane’s sis is getting married, and then a week later my little bro heads to Texas for boot camp (the Air Force). Not exactly a trip we can postpone. The 18-hour drive is stressful enough without mixing in two brand new canines, which will then have to room with my parents’ two dogs and cats while Shane & I skip town for a few days for the nuptials (which I hear will involve plenty of gawd-talk - oh my!).

So Gracie and Penelope (soon to be renamed Kaylee and Jayne, Kaylee and Katrina, or Kaylee and Selena…it’s still up in the air) will have to stay with their foster mom until then. The unfortunate part is that foster mommy cares for more animals than we realized, and houses many in a rented kennel, rotating which furbabies she takes home with her every night. So, I feel like quite the guilty “mother” right now. The thought of “my” girls sleeping on a cold concrete slab is too much to bear. Hell, the thought of any dog living like that kills me. People suck.

Anyway, to the Katrina links. Maybe I’ll get to writing a few more in-depth posts regarding some of these articles, maybe not. Either way, check ‘em out.

(More below the fold…)

1836 people dead (and counting). 705 missing. 770,000 displaced. An estimated $96 billion in property damage. Approximately 100 square miles of coastal wetlands destroyed.

Hurricane Katrina was the third-deadliest storm in U.S. history. In hours, it transformed New Orleans from a multicultural mecca of 485,000 into a Third World city, and created the “biggest refugee crisis since the American Civil War.” A year after the fact, I’m still horrified by the images borne of Katrina. It’s a scene you’d expect to see in Sudan, maybe, or perhaps India. Not in a developed nation, a world superpower.* Not here. Surely not in 21st century America.

Gross negligence and utter incompetence at all levels of government - local, state, and federal - helped transform Katrina from a destructive force of nature into the shame of a nation. Evacuation efforts were long overdue and woefully deficient. While a city drowned, our FEMA director set dinner dates, mulled his media appearances, and admired his Godly wardrobe. While a city drowned, our Dear Leader talked Medicare, strummed a gui-tar, and had him some cake. While a city drowned, 20,000 residents packed the Superdome, the “refuge of last resort.” While a city drowned, evacuees were given an impossible ultimatum: leave the city without your animals - or don’t leave at all.

In the chaos of last-ditch mandatory evacuations and rising floodwaters, tens of thousands of companions animals were left to fend for themselves. Some never had a chance: cats trapped in crates and dogs tied to fences drowned, alone. We’ll probably never know how many animals perished in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The Louisiana SPCA estimates that 15,000 companion animals were rescued in the months after the storm. The lucky ones - 20%, at most - have been reunited with their families. Others found new homes, scattered across the nation. A significant number sit in foster homes and shelters, waiting for their new lives to begin. On this one-year anniversary of Katrina’s landfall, hundreds of stray and abandoned dogs and cats still roam the streets of New Orleans.

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

Concern for animals does not negate one’s concern for humans, no more so than does recognizing the equality of women to men lessen the lot of males. Rather, the recognition of the intrinsic worth of all beings elevates our moral status. By protecting and caring for the most vulnerable among us - children, the poor, the mentally ill, the elderly - we’re showing our humanity. It’s easy to make a beneficiary of one who is (or will some day become) your benefactor; harder still to extend your circle of compassion to the weak, the vulnerable, the powerless. And there is no group more vulnerable than non-human animals.

They are our guardians, our protectors, our confidants. Our friends and companions. For many, they are family.

Yet, more than any other disenfranchised group, animals were tossed aside like so much property. Along with bikes and toaster ovens and television sets, they were left to Hurricane Katrina. They were sacrificed so that their “owners” might live.

To anyone who’s ever loved an animal, it’s a foolish proposition: either abandon your animal, or die with him. Many New Orleanians chose to stay. Perhaps Katrina’s death toll would not have been so devastating had people been allowed to evacuate with their “pets.” Besides, it’s not as if the Snowballs of New Orleans would have taken seats that otherwise would have gone to human evacuees. No, there’s no excuse for our government’s cruel and inhumane “no pets” policy. To abandon an animal in any other situation is a crime; in the state of Louisiana, such neglect is considered cruelty to animals, punishable by up to six months in jail. Yet, for the United States government, it is a matter of policy.

Almost a year after Katrina, and shortly before the passage of the Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards (PETS) Act, evacuees were again forced by the US government to leave their animals behind. The setting: the war zone of the Israeli/Lebanese border. Though other nations allowed their citizens to flee the bombing with their beloved animals, Americans were told to leave their furry family members behind. To this. Clearly, talk about “lessons learned from Katrina” is so much lip service. Our politicians** have learned nothing.

If it’s true that “the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated” - and I believe it is - then the US has a long road to travel before we can rightly call ourselves a “civilized”, “developed” nation.

(More below the fold…)

I can’t believe I didn’t see this earlier, but Playboy featured an interview with Michael “Imafashiongawd!” Brown in its August 4th edition. What a hoot!

The Sun Herald has some of the highlights:

If Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff should take charge during the next crisis:

“I don’t think it would be a good thing. Chertoff is a bright man, but he’s an appellate judge. He tends to manage the way you do court decisions: ‘Put the brief in front of me and I’ll make a decision.’ You need more of a strategic point of view. You need dynamism, leadership and a plan.”

Let me guess, Mike - you had all three? Such a shame they let you resign!

His reaction to Mississippi Congressman Gene Taylor’s statement on Brown’s inability to relate to the devastation and loss people experienced from the hurricane:

“That congressman, that little twerp, said I didn’t understand suffering. He said I didn’t understand the death and suffering that was going on. As I told him, I’ve seen death and suffering. I’ve smelled death. I smelled death in the tsunami. I know what it’s like to lose close friends in disasters. You don’t know how many people I’ve hugged as FEMA director - rich people, poor people, all ethnicities, people who lost everything. People who didn’t think it was going to happen to them. For that little twerp to claim I didn’t understand death and suffering - he can just bite me, for all I care.”

He’ll have to get in line, Brownie. I’m sure half of NO would love to tear you a new one (that’s the pre-Katrina population, you douchebag). Even if they have to do it with bared teeth. Methinks even your bloated-with-his-own-sense-of-self-worth body parts are less toxic than the floodwater your victims had to tread while waiting for help to arrive.

On Bush’s statement “No one anticipated the breach of the levees:”

“He doesn’t have an incredible command of the English language. Maybe he meant ‘None of us really wanted this to happen.’ My friends in the Republican Party-the bullies-jumped all over Clinton about parsing words. Now the president was parsing words. ‘Are the levees going to break?’ ‘Are they going to top?’ Who cares? We are going to have flooding in New Orleans, and we knew New Orleans was a fishbowl.”

Ah, yes, bring it back to Clinton. Because getting a little head is way worse than sitting idly by while thousands of your country’s citizens are deluged by a foreseeable Category 5 hurricane.

On the thought of quitting:

“In the middle of the disaster I thought about quitting - after the first few days. But then I thought, ‘People are dying, people are suffering; I can’t leave.’ It was a no-win situation. So I truly had to be the scapegoat.”

Uh, yeah, because you were so helpful, Mike, so fucking instrumental to the evacuation efforts, it would have just been devastating for you to quit.

Wait, wait, wait. I’m getting a strange sense of déjà vu. A la 1985. You know, when Val Kilmer was still hawt:

Mom? Mom, are you there?
Baby, you sound upset. What’s wrong?
Mom, I don’t like it here anymore. I want to come home and live with you.
It’s not for you to like. It’s for you to do. You’re fifteen years old now…
But I want to come home and live with you!
You want to live with me and Daddy?
Yeah, and dad too. I want to go back to high school…
Dad’s rented out your room.
You rented out my room? Mom, to who!?
You remember Mr. Efferet. He’s the plumber.
Well can’t Mr. Efferet and I share it? Mom, I don’t want to stay here anymore!
Now Mitchie! That doesn’t sound like Mama’s little soldier.

Ahem.

On the controversial release of his e-mails:

“I was pissed off because every one of those e-mails was taken out of context. I must have had 100,000 e-mails, and they selectively released ones that made me look bad. Do you remember the famous one about being a fashion god?”

Oh yeah, we remember, Mitchie Mikey baby.

On coming out to clear his name:

“I’m a fighter and I believe I’m right. When I lost my job and everyone was piling on, my wife and a couple of good friends said to me, ‘We know you’re down in the dumps now, but you’re going to be judged by history for two things: whether you respond to this in a dignified way and whether you do it at the right time.’ I made the determination to bide my time and, when the time was right, to come out fighting. The time has come.”

Just like Mama’s FEMA’s Little Soldier.

Originally posted @ www.kellygarbato.com/blog/2006-08-27/
Filed under: Current Events, Hurricane Katrina — Kelly @ August 27, 2006 11:52 pm

I saw the following story on Yahoo - it was posted on an anti-AR mailing list, of all places! - and just thought I’d share. The one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is fast approaching. Please take a moment to “think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight,” and consider making a donation to Best Friends, BETA, or another animal rescue group to help the (non-human) animal victims of natural (and man-made) disasters.

Jazz Funeral for Pets Lost to Katrina
New Orleans holds jazz funeral, memorial service for pets lost to Hurricane Katrina

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 21, 2006
By JANET McCONNAUGHEY Associated Press Writer

Some came to the jazz funeral memorial march with photographs of pets lost in Hurricane Katrina’s floods or aftermath. Others came with just their memories.

Earl Madona and his fiancee, Maggie Smith, brought a giant dog mask and two stuffed animals to symbolize their three dogs, two of them lost in the floodwaters.

They were among about 100 people who gathered Sunday night on the Esplanade Street median for a 10-block walk to a memorial service at St. Anna’s Episcopal Church. Some marched with their dogs.

“It’s just a nice way to pay tribute to all those that were lost so horribly, you know, all those that suffered,” said Gail Langos, who was walking with her dachshunds, Merlin and Muffin. […]

Before the march began Sunday, the Rev. Bill Terry of St. Anna’s Episcopal Church spoke briefly with members of the Treme Brass Band. “You know what to do,” he told them. “You’ve done it a million times before.”

Later, he told the crowd: “We’re New Orleans. This is how we mourn.”

Jazz funeral marches traditionally start with a dirge for the mourners’ sorrow, then move into an uptempo celebration of the loved one’s life and salvation.

This time, the march stepped off to a slow rendition of “Just a Closer Walk With Thee.”

There was a bit of silence. The drums rattled briskly, and the band swung into “Just a Little While to Stay Here.”

Originally posted @ www.kellygarbato.com/blog/2006-08-21/
Filed under: Animals, Current Events, Hurricane Katrina — Kelly @ August 21, 2006 9:49 pm