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.
Such emotional scenes were repeated perhaps thousands of times along the Gulf Coast last week as 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.
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.
"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.
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.
You know, just a thought, but if the rescue workers and police didn't have to deal with the looters and would just shoot the criminal fuckers on sight like the should, they might have more time and resources to help the elderly and children rescue their pets.
