GULFPORT, Miss. -- Puppies are popping up everywhere amid the rubble left by Hurricane Katrina.
Animal welfare workers are seeing the tip of what they fear will be a big boom in dog births in parts of Louisiana and Mississippi hammered by the storm.
Officials say more than 6,000 pets were saved in the region after Katrina came ashore Aug. 29, and many of them were relocated to new homes elsewhere in the country. An unknown number drowned in the floodwaters or died later of injuries.
But thousands of animals remain, and humane organizations are beginning to see the result of even small numbers of animals running loose for weeks in neighborhoods where fences were flattened and owners fled.
"I've never seen so many puppies in my life," said Manny Maciel, an animal control officer from New Bedford, Mass., who has made two trips south to help trap loose dogs and cats in New Orleans and Mississippi.
Maciel recently pulled 10 puppies and their mother from beneath a porch in a particularly hard-hit section of Biloxi. On another two-hour shift he found seven puppies and seven other dogs.
Maciel took all the animals to the Humane Society of South Mississippi, where a shelter built for 75 animals now holds about 250 dogs and cats on any given day, including nearly 50 puppies. The shelter is the largest operating on the Mississippi coast.
Tara High, executive director of the nonprofit group, said workers have yet to see a spike in cat births, but dogs are proliferating.
"We're beginning to get litters now," said High, a board member thrust into the job in the post-Katrina frenzy when the former director quit unexpectedly. "It's a lot of puppies, and it's not puppy season."
Puppies are brought in daily by residents and workers such as Maciel, who is among eight professional trappers working with the Humane Society of the United States to help capture animals running loose in the hurricane zone. They use lassos and harmless wire cages baited with food to capture dogs and cats.
A big part of the job for Maciel and partner Janis Moore of Springfield, Vt., is encouraging pet owners to help stem the puppy boom by having their animals spayed or neutered. Maciel and Moore drive through mostly abandoned neighborhoods checking reports of stray animals and asking people to let them "fix" their pets for free.
Some animal owners, even those living in vans while their battered homes are being repaired, do not want to part with their pets for fear they will never see them again.
"A lot of times, it's the only thing they've got," Moore said.
Animals without owners often wind up at the shelter, where workers are overwhelmed despite the trickle of volunteers still coming through to help walk dogs and clean up.
Of the 300 or so animals that had to be euthanized in November at the shelter, all were too old, sick or aggressive to be adopted, High said. Three hundred seventy-eight other dogs and cats were adopted.
