Pet Reunions Rare After the Storms

I know what you mean, Ditter. I couldn't imagine having to do that.

On another sad note, after SPCA and HS groups got involved at the bus sites, owners were told the pet would only be taken care of if the owner signed a certain piece of paper-- it was an owner surrender form.

Many pets listed as Katrina Owner Surrendered up for adoption, were really taken from the owner under duress.

It's a heartache all around.

This is horrible. I saw the film of the man with the little white dog who was told to leave it when he got on the bus. He kissed the dog, then set it down.

Now, I'll tell you. If it was a choice of bus or walk, I would walk and carry my dog. There is NO WAY I would leave my companion dog. I'd crawl if I had to. I would not leave my dog to become a statistic.

Now, North Georgia has gotten two or three groups of animals and have adopted them all out. I don't think any of the animals are "fostered" until their owners can be located. They "belong" to the new owners.

Just like everything else that comes out of Louisiana, there was no reasonable plan to evacuate people who had pets. THERE IN lies the problem.

Pet lovers may want to work toward a solution to the issue of evacuation of pets with the ASPCA so that there is a National Plan for anything in the future.

After I retire (next year), I'll be volunteering at the County Animal Shelter and I'll be working with them to come up with protocol for abandoned and rescued pets as a result of a disaster.

after SPCA and HS groups got involved at the bus sites, owners were told the pet would only be taken care of if the owner signed a certain piece of paper-- it was an owner surrender form. Many pets listed as Katrina Owner Surrendered up for adoption, were really taken from the owner under duress.

The whole situation was under duress. I wouldn't fault the SPCA workers for taking on the task of taking the dogs, only with the understanding that they were being surrendered for adoption. The implications of merely taking care of them on behalf of owners who may be months away from the stability required to take them back, is overly burdonsome on volunteers and agencies alike, who will have to make a lot of decisions about locations and medical care for animals, even without the added burdon of finding the owner and seeking permission and reimbursement for such care and treatment some time down a road that no one at the time could see very far down.

I'd read that the Humane Society U.S. received about $17,000,000 in donations from Katrina. Yet where are they now a few months afterwards? You'd think they could put some of that money to use now for feeding etc. I wrote to the them asking how that 17 mill was used and received no answer. And I had a real name & email address to write to. Still no response.

You should not expect a response from the Humane Society U.S. They are a hard left activist group that raises money from good willed, emotional people [e.g. "the poor animals ... something must be done"].

Despite its name, the Humane Society of the U.S. [HSUS]does not operate a single animal shelter. They use the funds they raise for such activities as lobbying for ballot initiatives. HSUS is a funnel for diverting funds to other left wing groups. HSUS is not an animal care group, it is an animal rights organization just like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA] and Animal Liberation Front [ALF].

Anyone willing to make a donation to any group should be prudent enough to do a simple Google search on the name of the group. Such a search turned up the following information on HSUS, from the ActivistCash.com website:

Link to www.activistcash.com

This excerpt is from a very long article that should be read in its entirety for anyone wanting to understand HSUS, what it is, and how it operates:

Humane Society of the United States
2100 L Street, NW, Washington, DC 20037
Phone 202-452-1100 | Fax 202-258-3051 | Email wpacelle@hsus.org

Despite the words “humane society” on its letterhead, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is not affiliated with your local animal shelter. Despite the omnipresent dogs and cats in its fundraising materials, it’s not an organization that runs spay/neuter programs or takes in stray, neglected, and abused pets. And despite the common image of animal protection agencies as cash-strapped organizations dedicated to animal welfare, HSUS has become the wealthiest animal rights organization on earth.

HSUS is big, rich, and powerful, a “humane society” in name only. And while most local animal shelters are under-funded and unsung, HSUS has accumulated $113 million in assets and built a recognizable brand by capitalizing on the confusion its very name provokes. This misdirection results in an irony of which most animal lovers are unaware: HSUS raises enough money to finance animal shelters in every single state, with money to spare, yet it doesn’t operate a single one anywhere.

Instead, HSUS spends millions on programs that seek to economically cripple meat and dairy producers; eliminate the use of animals in biomedical research labs; phase out pet breeding, zoos, and circus animal acts; and demonize hunters as crazed lunatics. HSUS spends $2 million each year on travel expenses alone, just keeping its multi-national agenda going. HSUS president Wayne Pacelle described some of his goals in 2004 for The Washington Post: “We will see the end of wild animals in circus acts … [and we’re] phasing out animals used in research. Hunting? I think you will see a steady decline in numbers.” More recently, in a June 2005 interview, Pacelle told Satya magazine that HSUS is working on “a guide to vegetarian eating, to really make the case for it.” A strict vegan himself, Pacelle added: “Reducing meat consumption can be a tremendous benefit to animals.”
[...]

A True Multinational Corporation

HSUS is a multinational conglomerate with ten regional offices in the United States and a special Hollywood Office that promotes and monitors the media’s coverage of animal-rights issues. It includes a huge web of organizations, affiliates, and subsidiaries. Some are nonprofit, tax-exempt “charities,” while others are for-profit taxable corporations, which don’t have to divulge anything about their financial dealings.

This unusually complex structure means that HSUS can hide expenses where the public would never think to look. For instance, one HSUS-affiliated organization called the HSUS Wildlife Land Trust collected $21.1 million between 1998 and 2003. During the same period, it spent $15.7 million on fundraising expenses, most of which directly benefited HSUS. This arrangement allowed HSUS to bury millions in direct-mail and other fundraising costs in its affiliate’s budget, giving the public (and charity watchdog groups) the false impression that its own fundraising costs were relatively low.
[...]

From Animal Welfare to Animal Rights

There is an enormous difference between animal “welfare” organizations, which work for the humane treatment of animals, and animal “rights” organizations [like HSUS], which aim to completely end the use and ownership of animals. The former have been around for centuries; the latter emerged in the 1980s, with the rise of the radical People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

The Humane Society of the United States began as an animal welfare organization. Originally called the National Humane Society, it was established in 1954 as a spin-off of the American Humane Association (AHA). Its founders wanted a slightly more radical group -- the AHA did not oppose sport hunting or the use of shelter animals for biomedical research.

In 1980, HSUS officially began to change its focus from animal welfare to animal rights. After a vote was taken at the group’s San Francisco national conference, it was formally resolved that HSUS would “pursue on all fronts … the clear articulation and establishment of the rights of all animals … within the full range of American life and culture.”

In Animal Rights and Human Obligations, the published proceedings of this conference, HSUS stated unequivocally that “there is no rational basis for maintaining a moral distinction between the treatment of humans and other animals.” It’s no surprise, then, that a 2003 HSUS fundraising mailer boasted that the group has been working toward “putting an end to killing animals for nearly half a century.”

In 1986 John McArdle, then HSUS’s Director of Laboratory Animal Welfare, told Washingtonian magazine that HSUS was “definitely shifting in the direction of animal rights faster than anyone would realize from our literature.”

The group completed its animal-rights transformation during the 1990s, changing its personnel in the process. HSUS assimilated dozens of staffers from PETA and other animal-rights groups, even employing John “J.P.” Goodwin, a former Animal Liberation Front member and spokesman with a lengthy arrest record and a history of promoting arson to accomplish animal liberation.

The change brought more money and media attention. Hoyt explained the shift in 1991, telling National Journal, “PETA successfully stole the spotlight … Groups like ours that have plugged along with a larger staff, a larger constituency … have been ignored.” Hoyt agreed that PETA’s net effect within the animal-rights movement was to spur more moderate groups to take tougher stances in order to attract donations from the public. “Maybe.” Hoyt mused, “the time has come to say, ‘Since we haven’t been successful in getting half a loaf, let’s go for the whole thing.’”

HSUS leaders have even expressed their desire to put an end to the lifesaving biomedical research that requires the use of animals. As early as 1988 the group’s mailings demanded that the U.S. government “eliminate altogether the use of animals as research subjects.” In 1986 Washingtonian asked then-HSUS Vice-President for Laboratory Animals John McArdle about his opinion that brain-dead humans should be substituted for animals in medical research. “It may take people a while to get used to the idea,” McArdle said, “but once they do the savings in animal lives will be substantial.”

McArdle realized then what HSUS understands today -- that an uncompromising, vegetarian-only, anti-medical-progress philosophy has limited appeal. At the 1984 HSUS convention, he gave his group’s members specific instructions on how to frame the issue most effectively. “Avoid the words ‘animal rights’ and ‘antivivisection’,” McArdle said. “They are too strange for the public. Never appear to be opposed to animal research. Claim that your only concern is the source of animals.”

In a 1993 letter published by the American Society for Microbiology, Dr. Patrick Cleveland of the University of California San Diego spelled out HSUS’s place in the animal-rights pantheon. "What separates the HSUS from other animal rights groups,” Cleveland wrote, “is not their philosophy of animal rights and goal of abolishing the use of animals in research, but the tactics and timetable for that abolition.” Cleveland likened it to the difference between a mugger and a con man. “They each will rob you — they use different tactics, have different timetables, but the result is the same. The con man may even criticize the mugger for using confrontational tactics and giving all thieves a bad name, but your money is still taken.”

Targeting Meat and Dairy

In 2004 HSUS promoted long-time vice president Wayne Pacelle to the position of President. Along with Pacelle’s passionate style and his experience navigating the halls of Congress, HSUS got its first strictly vegan leader.

One of Pacelle’s first acts as HSUS’s new chief executive was to send a memo to all HSUS staffers articulating his vision for the future. HSUS’s new “campaigns section,” Pacelle wrote, “will focus on farm animals.” For Americans accustomed to eating meat, eggs, and dairy foods, the thought of an animal rights group with a budget three times the size of PETA’s targeting their food choices should be unsettling. And Pacelle has hired other high-profile, unapologetic meat and dairy “abolitionists” since taking over.

In 2005, former Compassion Over Killing (COK) president Miyun Park joined HSUS as a staffer in its new “farm animals and sustainable agriculture department.” Around the same time, HSUS hired COK's other co-founder, Paul Shapiro, as manager of its derogatorily named “Factory Farming Campaign.” COK’s former general counsel Carter Dillard shortly afterward, as did vegan doctor and mad-cow-disease scaremonger Michael Greger. Like Pacelle, these new HSUS hires are all self-described vegans. Their arrival in the world’s richest animal-rights group signals that HSUS is giving anti-meat campaigns a prominent place.

In October, just a few months before he became an HSUS staffer, Shapiro told the 2004 National Student Animal Rights Conference that “nothing is more important than promoting veganism.” And Shapiro noted during an August 2004 animal-rights seminar (hosted by United Poultry Concerns) that after just 10 weeks at the helm, Pacelle had “already implemented a ‘no animal products in the office’ policy ... You know, they're going to have actual farmed-animal campaigns now, where they're going to be trying to legislate against gestation crates and all this stuff.”

Americans who enjoy meat, cheese, eggs, and milk may soon come to regard HSUS as a new PETA, with an even broader reach. Shortly after taking office, Pacelle announced a merger with the $20 million Fund For Animals. The combined group estimated its 2005 budget at “over $95 million” and also announced the formation of a new “political organization,” which will “allow for a more substantial investment of resources in political and lobbying activities.”

Domestic Deception

It takes tens of millions of dollars to run campaigns against so many domestic targets, and HSUS consistently misleads Americans with its fundraising efforts by hinting that it’s a “humane society” in the more conventional sense of the term. Buried deep within HSUS’s website is a disclaimer noting that the group “is not affiliated with, nor is it a parent organization for, local humane societies, animal shelters, or animal care and control agencies. These are independent organizations … HSUS does not operate or have direct control over any animal shelter.”

For instance, a 2001 member recruitment mailing called those on the HSUS mailing list “true pet lovers,” referring to unspecified work on behalf of “dogs, puppies, cats, [and] kittens.” Another recruitment mailing from that year included “Thank You,” “Happy Birthday,” and “Get Well Soon” greeting cards featuring pets such as dogs, cats, and fish. The business reply envelope lists “7 Steps to a Happier Pet.”

A 2003 recruitment mailing also included those “Steps,” as well as free address labels with pastel pictures of dogs and cats. The fundraising letter subtly substituted the animal-rights term “companion animals” for “pets.”

“Our mission is to encourage adoption in your neighborhood and throughout the country,” reads another HSUS fundraising appeal. “Even though local shelters are trying their best to save lives, they are simply overwhelmed.” That last sentence, at least, is true. But don’t count on the multi-million-dollar conglomerate HSUS to do anything about it. HSUS doesn’t operate a single animal shelter and has no hands-on contact with stray or surplus animals.

In 1995 the Washington (DC) Humane Society almost closed its animal shelter due to a budget shortfall. HSUS, which is also based in Washington, DC, ultimately withdrew an offer to build and operate a DC shelter, at its own expense, to serve as a national model.

In exchange for running the shelter, HSUS wanted three to five acres of city land and tax-exempt status for all its real estate holdings in the District of Columbia. The DC government offered a long-term lease, but that wasn’t good enough. HSUS refused to proceed unless it would “own absolutely” the land. The district declined, and what might have become the only HSUS-funded animal shelter never materialized.

So what does HSUS do with the millions it raises using the furry faces of Fido and Fluffy? In 2002, the multi-million-dollar conglomerate gave less than $150,000 to hands-on humane societies and animal shelters.

Worse, HSUS employees have complained to the press that their organization wastes its resources on fundraising expenses and high salaries for its chief executives. Robert Baker, an HSUS consultant and former chief investigator, told U.S. News & World Report: “The Humane Society should be worried about protecting animals from cruelty. It’s not doing that. The place is all about power and money.”

Influencing Communities HSUS doesn’t save flesh-and-blood animals the way local “humane societies” do, but it does lobby heavily to change the laws of communities across the country. “HSUS was the financial clout that rammed Initiative 713, the anti-trapping measure, down our throats,” reports Rich Landers of the Spokane (WA) Spokesman-Review. “I pleaded [with Wayne Pacelle, then HSUS’s government affairs VP] at least four times for examples of HSUS commitment in Washington [state] other than introducing costly anti-hunting and anti-wildlife management initiatives. He had no immediate answer but promised to send me the list of good things HSUS does in this state. That was six months ago, and I presume Pacelle is still searching.”

Like other national animal-rights groups, HSUS has learned that pouring huge sums of money into ballot initiative campaigns can give it results normal public relations and lobbying work never could. Along with other heavy hitters like the Fund for Animals and Farm Sanctuary, HSUS scored a big victory in Florida in 2002 when a ballot initiative passed that gave constitutional rights to pregnant pigs. HSUS donated at least $50,000 to the Florida PAC that managed the campaign. [...] And HSUS won’t stop at initiatives aimed at livestock farmers and trappers. At the 1996 HSUS annual meeting, Wayne Pacelle announced that the ballot initiative would be used for all manner of legislation in the future, including “companion animal [pets] issues and laboratory animal issues.” Pacelle has personally been involved in at least 22 such campaigns, 17 of which HSUS scored as victories. These operations, he said, “pay dividends and serve as a training ground for activists.”

HSUS is also a part of the Keep Antibiotics Working (KAW) coalition, a slick Washington-based PR campaign to end the “inappropriate” use of antibiotics in livestock animals. This coalition, comprised largely of science-deprived environmental groups, claims to worry deeply about antibiotic-resistant bacteria found in people. KAW doesn’t, however, devote any attention to the rampant over-prescription of the drugs to humans.
[...]

School Activism 101

Despite a radical animal-rights agenda similar to PETA’s, the Humane Society of the United States has gained entry to countless segments of polite society. One of the more worrisome consequences of this is the group’s relatively unfettered access to U.S. schools.

Through its National Association for Humane and Environmental Education, as well as a series of animal-rights-oriented publications, HSUS spreads animal-rights propaganda to schoolchildren as young as five.

One package, titled People and Animals -- A Humane Education Guide, suggests films and books for teachers to present to their students. In these recommended teaching tools, sport hunters are called “selective exterminators” and “drunken slobs” who participate in a “blood sport” and a “war on wildlife” with “maniacal attitudes toward killing.” Another teachers’ guide contains anti-circus stories in which animals are repeatedly depicted as overworked and abused.

At the same time, HSUS hypocritically complains that it is inappropriate for the federal government to distribute educational materials about the need for laboratory research animals, complaining: “These materials inappropriately target young people, who do not possess the cognitive ability to make meaningful decisions regarding highly controversial and complex issues.”

The “Humane” Web

In addition to the HSUS flagship offices in Maryland and DC, the organization’s global network includes control over many legal corporations (the list is evolving as new information becomes available). Follow the link at the top of this article to find a list of the many non-profit and for profit organizations funded by HSUS.
[...]

HSUS and its affiliates have received embarrassingly low scores from established charity watchdog groups. Worth magazine gave HSUS a “D” rating for spending as much as 53 percent of its expenses on fundraising. And online rating service Give.org noted that the huge HSUS corporate family does not have an active governing board overseeing the overall structure, and criticized the organization for holding only three board meetings during 2000, two of them on the same day. Charity Navigator gave only one star (out of four) to HSUS’s Earth Voice International, and zero to the Humane Society of the United States Wildlife Land Trust.

Hiring the Animal Liberation Front

Even seasoned animal-rights veterans were surprised in April 2000 when the Humane Society of the United States sent John “J.P.” Goodwin on an anti-fur junket to China. Goodwin was not just any animal activist: he was then an avowed member of the terrorist Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Less than a year later he was formally identified as an HSUS legislative affairs staffer; Goodwin would later change his rhetoric to match HSUS’s corporate policy of not endorsing violence as a protest tactic.

[...]

That was a very good posting. I've known about the HSUS for quite some time. I've discouraged anyone I know from donating to them because one for one they all thought their donated dollars would help cats & dogs. Not so.

Best advise to anyone wishing to donate is to give to a LOCAL group that you know does good work. HSUS doesn't fall anywhere near that.

I hated to post anything that long ... and cut it down as much as I could. I tangled with HSUS years ago ... they used to send me their revolting literature with pictures of maimed animals in traps. It took a lot of time, and significant threats [from a lawyer] to finally make them remove me from their mailing list. They are evil.

I agree that ... aside from hands on animal care/volunteer work by an individual ... the next best thing is contributions to a local organization where you can actually track how the money is used.

Sadly, most large organizations now are more about raising money than doing good.

I was appalled at how quickly HSUS jumped in to take advantage of the outpouring of goodwill after Hurricane Katrina.

Well I for one am glad you did post that long article. Maybe it will help get the message out that the HSUS is no friend to little "Spot".

People, as a whole, just don't know about them. Which is how they were able to get 17 mill in donations after Katrina. I hope some tv show will do an expose on them. Yeh, I know, keep dreaming. But it could happen one of these days and that would be the end of the gravy train.

"Snowball" has never been found, nor has any more information turned up. The only thing that is pretty well established is that the little white dog that was shown in video footage desperately pawing at the door of a bus as it drove away, was NOT a dog belonging to a young boy, and thus not the legendary "Snowball". That dog apparently belonged to an elderly woman who said "There goes 9 years of companionship" as the dog was taken from her. I really think there's no evidence whatsoever that "Snowball" and the little boy who supposedly vomited in hysterical grief over losing his dog, ever existed. Until AP answers the questions of the woman who is coordinating the reward fund (let's start with basic stuff, like what color was the little boy?), I'll continue to assume the story was a fabrication.

I had a long conversation with the woman who runs that website. There is just no evidence that the Snowball story was real, and AP was exceptionally uncooperative when she tried to get more information about it, so she could try to find the boy and use the reward money to help find the dog and reunite them. Also note that while practically every other news outlet on the planet continued to follow that story until the next hurricane hit, AP went oddly silent on it immediately after it first ran the story. If AP's reporter actually saw what she wrote that she saw, she'd have been able to provide at least some basic additional info (like what color the boy was) that would have helped the search for him and his family.

And according to the AP story, the boy and his family were on one of the buses which went to the big shelters in Houston and San Antonio. Evacuees in those shelters had non-stop access to mass media, mostly tuned to hurricane-related news coverage. Nearly all of these people would have seen the story and heard about the growing reward fund. But not ONE person came forward to either claim that they were part of the family in question, or to claim that they had witnessed the incident (and thus might have been able to help identify the family and collect some of the reward). These buses were holding 50-70 people per bus, and were being loaded at a staging area where many hundreds of people were lined up waiting to get on buses. It is not plausible that the events as described in the AP story happened without dozens of witnesses who would have recognized the incident in subsequent media coverage, and it's not plausible that not a single one of those dozens of people wouldn't have come forward (remember, they were almost all poor to begin with, had lost everything, and there was a sizeable reward being offered).

Notwithstanding legal technicalities about pets which were adopted out on a permanent basis, there's a special place in hell for anyone who adopted a pet whose hurricane-victim owner later located the pet, and then refused to give the pet back on the grounds that "it's legally mine now" -- and there have been a few reports of this.

There will always be reports of people acting selfishly and even wrongly... That's what people do. I just don't blame the volunteers who worked hard to collect and then find homes for, the many abandoned and lost animals.

Interesting about Snowball. I hadn't followed it closely enough to know there was controversy. Just one of the many Katrina legends...

If it hadn't been for the quick arrival of the next hurricane, I think AP and it's reporter would have been exposed on this. Instead, news coverage switched to all the new evacuees and re-evacuees, and thankfully, to the much-improved arrangements for evacuating pets.

I wonder if someone will ever write a book documenting the fiction, legend and truth of what happened after Katrina.

At the rate things reported as fact by major media outlets, are being debunked as legends, I'm beginning to wonder if the hurricane happened at all :-)

Well, I sure don't have any first-hand proof that it did. ;~D

Another Katrina dog who touched everyone's heart was "Oily Dog."

His picture at the gas station near his dead owner has haunted many of us, but there is a happy ending for him.

Would you please ping the dog list to this uplifting story:

http://www.ericsdogblog.com/

Thanks.

OILY DOG update :~D

Ping!

Other articles with keyword "DOGGIEPING" since 12/29/04