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Tuesday, September 6, 2005
Owners Distraught Over Leaving Pets
By Mike Stobbe
The Associated Press
ATLANTA— 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 as pet owners were forced to abandon their animals in the midst of evacuation.
The fate of pets is a huge but underappreciated cause of anguish for storm survivors, said Richard Garfield, professor of international clinical nursing at New York's Columbia University.
"People in shelters are worried about 'Did Fluffy get out?' '' he said. "It's very distressing for people, wondering if their pets are isolated or starving."
Valerie Bennett left her two dogs with an anesthesiologist who was taking care of about 30 staff members' pets on the roof of the 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.
The Bennetts had four animals, including their two beloved dogs.
They moved to Slidell, La., in July when Valerie took a job at an organ transplant institute. Lorne, a former paramedic, is disabled since undergoing a liver transplant in 2001.
As Hurricane Katrina approached, both went to the hospital to help and took all four animals with them.
Patients were evacuated, starting Aug. 31, by rescue workers using small boats to traverse the floodwaters surrounding the hospital. On Wednesday night, the Bennetts were told they had to go, too.
They fed their guinea pig and left it in its cage in a patient room. They couldn't refill its empty water bottle because of the hospital's plumbing, they said. They poured food on the floor for the cat, but again no water.
"I just hope that they forgive me," Valerie Bennett cried.