20 / Chapter 1
up or left in crates.^1 The lessons learned after Hurricane Katrina,
when thousands of animals were abandoned, seem to have been eas-
ily forgotten, even just a few hundred miles away.
Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana just after six A.M. on Mon-
day, August 29, 2005. This was the storm’s second landfall. It had
come ashore on the southeast coast of Florida four days earlier as
a category 1 hurricane. It brought heavy rainfall and winds up to
seventy miles an hour. It uprooted trees and did some structural
damage. Many areas lost power. It lost some strength as it traveled
across the Florida peninsula but became a category 3 hurricane over
the Gulf of Mexico.^2
On August 27, the Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cru-
elty to Animals (LA/SPCA) in New Orleans evacuated its 250 adopt-
able animals to the Houston SPCA in climate-controlled trucks. The
New Orleans facility, located on Japonica Street in the Ninth Ward,
was prone to fl ooding, and its emergency plan called for evacua-
tion for hurricanes of category 3 or above. Twenty-fi ve dogs who
were being held at the LA/SPCA as evidence in court cases, a com-
mon occurrence in animal sheltering, could legally not leave the
state. They were evacuated to Baton Rouge. The eighty or so ani-
mals housed at the Humane Society of Louisiana, located near the
Superdome, were evacuated to Tylertown, Mississippi, about two
hours north of New Orleans. A few months earlier, in what would
turn out to be extraordinarily good planning, the Humane Society
had purchased a plot of land with a house on it to use as a “future”
hurricane evacuation site. Staff christened it “Camp Katrina.”
The transfer of adoptable animals to other facilities occurs reg-
ularly in animal sheltering. It is labor-intensive, involving lots of
muscle, patience, and paperwork at both the departure and arrival
ends. The process had worked well in other recent hurricanes. For
example, before Hurricane Charley, which hit southwest Florida in
August 2004, the Suncoast Humane Society in Englewood trans-
ferred its one hundred cats and fi fty dogs to shelters outside the
storm’s predicted path, making room to accommodate animals
left homeless after the storm.^3 The transfer of animals out of New
Orleans was unique because of the large numbers. During the 2005