Hurricane Katrina response

[Graeblyn]

Originally posted by Kyla
I know I will get completely jumped on for saying this.. but, would you leave your child behind? In *my* mind, Charlie is my child, and I sure wouldn't dream of it.

That's what I was getting at. There are people who may not be able to access a pet friendly place after evacuation. I know from personal experience how hard it is to find a hotel that takes cats, and although I could fly them to relatives, if you followed the coverage leading up to the hurricane, you know that it became impossible to get a flight out very quickly. Moreover, it is quite possible to have the means to care for a pet properly, yet not have the disposable income to suddenly buy a plane ticket or pay for gas to drive across country to relatives. There were little to no options for pet owners, besides leaving their pets alone to die, and for many pet owners, that simply isn't an option. You can say nobody who doesn't have a nest egg saved up for an evacuation emergency should own a pet, or that society shouldn't care about such people, and just write them off as animal loving nuts, but regardless, the fact remains that it would be very simple to address the whole issue by making the shelters more receptive to evacuees with pets (as by the way, some have been), and mobilizing ASPCA and HUMANE Society resources, as by the way, was done, eventually.

Just because someone loves their cat or dog as much as they do their own life, is no reason to let them die in an affluent country with PLENTY of resources to take care of both people and their pets. The proof of this can be seen in how quickly funding was put together for animal charities by animal lovers nationwide, and without compromising at all the donations to other charities.

People no doubt died because they wouldn't abandon their pets. Clearly we can do better, and to refuse to do so, simply because you think poor people shouldn't have pets or because you think people shouldn't love their pets so much reflects a lack of humanity that for the purposes of this argument would be amusingly ironic if it weren't such a tragic issue.