In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and certainly as I’ve discussed here before, the devastating impact to pets was disheartening.  Thankfully, organizations like the Humane Society and SPCA (and the various flavors of both) conducted rescue operations to save as many animals as possible.  But what happened to all of the rescued pets?  Were they returned to their previous owners?  If they could not be found, were they adopted out to other families?  The truth is a little bit of both, and it’s not turning out very pretty.

Volunteer groups estimate that 50,000 pets were stranded after the storm. Some died, others went wild, skirting the shadows of New Orleans and its parishes. Sometimes heroically, volunteers scouring the flooded city in duck boats and canoes rescued about 15,000 of those animals – including dogs, cats, parakeets, and even goats.

But many animals disappeared, whether picked directly from the muck or given to out-of-state adopters by the multi-agency bureaucracy that coordinated the rescue effort – even as original owners continued a desperate search.

[…]

In many cases, overwhelmed shelters were forced to find new homes for pets that had not been claimed even after pictures were posted on the Internet.

Now, courts in North Carolina, Florida, and Texas have stepped in to sort out where the pets lost after Katrina belong.

Ultimately, the original families searched and searched to find their pets, and many are finding to their dismay that their pets have been adopted out to other families, and in many cases those families are spread across the country.  Remember that most of those displaced by the storm spent weeks and months in shelters, being shuffled to and fro, and struggling just to find a place to live and a job, and many were not allowed to return to their homes for significant amounts of time.

So who gets the pet?  Is it the original parent who had to leave them behind?  Or is that considered abandonment and the pet now belongs to its newly adopted family?  It’s a difficult question to answer, and each case undoubtedly will hinge on its own merits and evidence.  For the pets caught in the middle, however, the issue is far more complex.

As thousands of Americans became part of a huge Katrina pet adoption project, court documents describe how class and race have become issues since some defendants claim that the animals are better off in wealthier homes than in poorer ones, where care may be substandard.

“These animals are only moving in one direction, from poor to rich and from black to white and, as an American, that really bothers me,” says Steven Wise, an animal rights lawyer in Florida, who is handling two custody cases.

A significant amount of the fight is now centering on who can provide the better care.  It offends me on many levels to see animals used as tools in this kind of class warfare.  The families who adopted such pets and are now claiming the pet is better off with them because they make more money should seriously consider that there’s always someone who makes more money than they do.  Under their very own logic, we should remove the pets from their homes and give them only to the wealthiest among us.  That would, after all, ensure the best of care, right?  Of course not.  And how demented do you have to be to consider your social class an indicator of the right to have a pet.  More importantly, how vile to justify your own selfish desires by trying to belittle someone who has already lost almost everything and who is only trying to get back a beloved family member.

The struggle also delves a great deal into the condition of the animal when it was left behind.

…Pam Bondi, a state prosecutor in Tampa, Fla., adopted a Katrina St. Bernard dog from St. Bernard Parish, and named him Noah. Earlier this month, the dog’s original owners, who had named him Master Tank, flew to Florida and filed a lawsuit against Ms. Bondi and the Humane Society of Pinellas and gave a press conference. Bondi has refused to return the dog, because she says a case of heartworms is evidence that the dog was neglected before the storm.

I have a difficult time not finding Ms. Bondi a spiteful, selfish little wench.  Is she a veterinarian?  Does her position as a state prosecutor somehow give her the expertise to determine the animal’s history based on post-Katrina heartworms?  And, perhaps because she didn’t notice, a great deal of the animals who survived the storm became infected with a great many diseases and parasites.  With all that sitting water filled with sewage, debris, dead animals, and other detritus, mosquitos, pathogens, and other dangers spread like wildfire throughout the affected areas.  Did she consider this in her determination?

One of the greatest offenses has been perpetrated by the rescue organizations and rescuers themselves.

“I think many rescuers got judgmental, they saw so much horrible stuff and they decided that they didn’t want to hear the reasons why the dogs were left behind,” says Becky Correia, of Stealth Volunteers, a group trying to reunite owners with pets they lost after Katrina.

For those who felt the animals were abandoned and therefore legally available for adoption to other people, think again.  People were forced to abandon their animals.  I know the major media outlets never talked about this aspect of the catastrophe…  Whatever.

It was all over the news that the promise of rescue was directly weighed against the lives of pets.  It’s repulsive for anyone to claim those animals were simply abandoned by their previous owners, and that such abandonment constitutes a waiver of any rights they might have had.  If nothing else, that’s a very weaselly point of view, not to mention a great deal sleazy.  But we also have to consider the law in such cases.

State laws, so far, are on the side of the original owners because pets are considered property, not family, law experts say. “Finders, keepers” laws state that property must be abandoned for at least a year before original owners lose their rights to it unless the finders can prove they made a good-faith effort to find the owner. In Louisiana, the requirement is three years. In January, a New Jersey judge ordered a family to return a dog adopted after Katrina to its owner in New Orleans.

And yet, there are cases that, to me anyway, are so clear and unarguable that they demand immediate correction.  For instance, what of a soldier in Iraq at the time of the storm, someone who left his dog with family in New Orleans?  When his family evacuated, they were forced to leave the dog behind.

There’s a spot on Army Lt. Jay Johnson’s bed that is heavy with emptiness, he says, and it can only be filled with his beloved Missy.

He was in Iraq when his family broke the news to him that volunteer rescuers who scoured New Orleans after hurricane Katrina had taken away his furry Shih Tzu.

An ID chip implanted in Missy should have ensured her return to him, he says, but instead she was allowed to be adopted by another family. Mr. Johnson hopes to reclaim his dog by suing the entity which took ownership of her after the storm: the Humane Society of North Texas.

“I fight against people who do harm to other people, and I feel it’s my obligation to fight in this case,” Johnson says.

Therein lies the rub.  If the animal had an ID chip or other identifying marker, things meant to ensure its safe return, why would it have been adopted out arbitrarily instead of trying to reunite the dog with her real family?  It would be understandable if this was the only case, but it’s not.

There is also the question as to the original welfare of the animal.  What if they had heartworms?  Or another ailment or sign of neglect or mistreatment?  And how do you tell if it indeed predated the storm?  And how does one demonstrate clearly that such an ailment was ignored and intentionally left untreated?  Can you prove the original family knew of the problem and consciously chose not to address it?

As for the belief by the rescuers that the animals were abandoned, again I say that such a concept is repugnant and offensive.  People were forced to leave without their pets.  They were placed in a position of having to decide between rescue, food and water, or their pets.  Attempts to label that as abandonment and a sign that the animal should be adopted out to another family is actually an indication of outright contemptible evil.

This is why, as I said before, governments at all levels should implement laws to address this situation in the future.  Right now, the courts are being forced to determine ownership, and much of that question hinges on whether pets are considered property or family.  There is a big difference.

The lawsuits are efforts to reunite family members – even fuzzy ones – who have been separated by Katrina. They also raise troubling questions about whether animals should be treated as property or as members of the family – and which homes they belong in.

“We’re trying to distinguish between dog-nappers and good-faith finders, and that’s a huge gray area right now from hurricane Katrina,” says David Favre, a law professor at Michigan State University in Lansing and an animal law expert.

In my opinion, the law needs to err on the side of the original family in all such cases.  The burden of proof is on the rescue and adoption agencies, not to mention the new adopters, to demonstrate the animal was neglected, abandoned outside of the government mandate to do so, abused, or otherwise in a home where its welfare was in undeniable jeopardy.  If definitive evidence can not be produced to show this, the animal must be returned.

There is a certain sense of animal abuse involved in all of this.  Pets acclimate to their environments.  They become accustomed to their families and homes, and it causes them emotional and psychological harm to be arbitrarily moved.  I can assure you that no pet who is forcibly placed with a new family will ever be the same, and that animal will always have a special connection with their original family.

The situation is ugly and only getting worse.  I assure you that were I in the same situation and lost my pets under such circumstances, nothing would stop me from taking them back, even if that meant using significant judicial force.

That is why representatives need to address this legislatively.  First, resolve the abandonment orders from governments.  No one should ever have to decide between their pet and their own life.  Second, the laws need to establish rescue and adoption guidelines that ensure pets are returned to their rightful families unless extenuating circumstances clearly demonstrate it was in imminent danger in its original home.