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This is cool —

October 10, 2006

Dear Catherine,

This past Friday at the White House, President Bush signed the Pets Evacuation and Transportation Standards (PETS) Act into law.

This landmark legislation, which was strongly backed by The Humane Society of the United States, requires local and state disaster plans to include provisions for household pets and service animals in the event of a major disaster or emergency. When I was in the Gulf during Hurricane Katrina, I saw the government's failure to have a plan for helping animals. Tens of thousands of animals suffered terribly and were lost or left behind because our communities and responders didn't have a plan in place.

With more than 358 million pets in the United States residing in 63 percent of American households, the PETS Act will help ensure that Americans never again are faced with the horrifying choice of abandoning their pet and finding their way to safety, or staying with their pet and remaining in a hazardous, and potentially life-threatening situation.

Some states and local communities have already engaged in disaster preparedness for animals, and with a federal law now in place, the future for you and your companion animal in a disaster is much brighter.

Thank you for helping us pass the PETS Act, and for all you do on behalf of animals!

Sincerely,
Wayne Pacelle
President & CEO
The Humane Society of the United States

I remember watching one impoverished 50- or 60-year old woman being forced to leave her tiny house and her dog....and I just don't ever want to see that again.

Your house is gone, lady, and now it's time to kiss your dog goodbye! (No criticism of the rescue workers intended. They were overrun; they had their marching orders; they needed to follow their orders. Most of the time people have to come first.)

Probably like most dog people, that was my most upsetting moment, watching the coverage.

An entire city devastated by a massive hurricane?

Thousands dead? [as we thought in the first days]

I could watch all of that with some sense of distance. But the instant I saw uniformed men telling some lady her dog had to go it was you are there.

I know we have our "no politics" rule around here, but pet evacuation, like the math wars, transcends the culture wars.

So I put this up.



We had a funny moment re: dog law around here awhile back.

A few months ago Surfer — it would be Surfer — mortally wounded an enormous raccoon the size of a two-year old in the brush behind my neighbor's house.

My neighbor called the police, because here she had this child-sized bleeding raccoon-guy sitting right outside her window staring at her; it seemed the thing to do.

Of course after they got here we started thinking maybe it wasn't the thing to do, because the police decided the raccoon couldn't be saved.

Which meant they needed to shoot it to death right here, in the middle of our joint lawn. By then the raccoon had somehow ended up inside the limbs of a woody bush just beneath my dining room window. He was ensnared in the officers' big raccoon-catching net, but they couldn't pull him out through the "legs" of the bush to get a clean shot because he'd braced himself against the two largest of the limbs and he was so strong, even in his wounded condition, that they couldn't pull him through.

And he looked like a furry two year old.

So they shot him where he was there in the legs of the bush, making his last stand facing the two humans.

My neighbor and I both jumped out of our skins when we heard the shot. The officer had told us exactly what they were going to do and what it was going to sound like, and we still jumped out of our skin.

But then, we both felt.....OK. It's done.

It wasn't done.

The raccoon was still alive. It seemed to take ages for the two officers to determine his condition; they went through a long, cautious procedure trying to see whether they'd actually killed the animal they were trying to kill.

Finally they shot him again.

And examined him again.

He was unbelievably big and strong, a noble creature. He'd survived Surfer and two bullets. And he was still alive.

It took 3 shots altogether.

The animal control officer was a sweet man. He'd had years of experience with middle-aged ladies who have no idea what it takes to kill a large, strong animal.

So he was being kind and sensitive, taking down all my info, and yet.....there was something he wasn't quite telling me.

Or, rather, something he was telling me that I wasn't quite getting.

I knew this because I kept telling him Abby had been involved in the raccoon incident, too, and he kept refusing to write down anything about Abby at all. He was only interested in Surfer, and he would only write down information about Surfer.

What I wasn't getting was that if the raccoon turned out to be rabid, and Surfer didn't have his shots up to date, an animal control officer would come to my house and take Surfer away and kill him.^*

I had no idea that option was on the menu.

Naturally Surfer didn't have his shots in order. Just our luck. We thought he did, but he didn't.

We'd gotten Surfer at an animal shelter back when he was a puppy, and we took him home thinking the shelter had given him his first set of shots.

Now it appeared they hadn't given him the shots, which meant that although he'd had all the succeeding shots in the correct succeeding order, he was somehow off track in his rabies shots according to the tenets of dog law.

I discovered all this at my vet's office, where I'd taken Surfer that afternoon, after the death of the raccoon in the morning.

Surfer seemed fine, but my vet got a funny look on his face when he looked through Surfer's records.

"We don't have any documentation of shots from the animal shelter," he said. The animal control people had to have documentation.

So somebody called the animal shelter, or maybe we called Ed and he checked whatever records he could find and — surprise! — it appeared that Surfer hadn't had the shelter shots we all thought he'd had.

Lucky for us, that wasn't going to matter because Surfer had had a surprise rabies shot not long after we'd brought him home, when he'd run away one afternoon and landed at the New Rochelle animal shelter. [note: aboveground invisible fences cost a fraction of the price of underground invisible fences & work great] New Rochelle won't release your animal to you without giving him a shot, so he'd had the shot.

But my vet didn't have documentation of the New Rochelle shot and the animal control people weren't going to take my word for it. Furthermore, my vet was not going to be able to get documentation from New Rochelle because, as he said, "I can't call up and say he's a brown and black Rottweiler mix you picked up in winter 2002."

In between explaining the ins and outs of animal control law he kept wincing and saying, "I think it's going to be alright. I don't think it's going to be a problem." He said this so many times, and winced so many times, that it became crystal clear to me that not having the papers was a problem so vast and insurmountable that its dimensions could reasonably be described as life-altering.

So, bottom line, my vet only had documentation for the shots he'd given him himself, in a sequence assuming the shots at the animal shelter & New Rochelle had actually occurred.

Which nobody could prove. We had no way to prove Surfer had had enough rabies vaccine to come out of a fight with a rabid raccoon rabies-free himself.

And there is no way to tell if an animal is or is not rabid without sacrificing the animal and autopsying his brain.

If the raccoon came back rabid, which the animal control officer thought was a distinct possibiliy, Surfer was in trouble.



Surfer is still with us.

This episode proves that a) there is a God and b) He thinks I need a dog (a couple of dogs apparently), because the instant I got home from the vet's, after announcing to the grown-up occupants of the kitchen that Animal control can come get Surfer and kill him if we can't prove he's had his shots, I went downstairs, pulled Surfer's file out of the fireproof lockbox that holds the passports, mortgage, social security cards, Jimmy's & Andrew's Medicaid waivers, and Abby's purebred Labrador papers, and pulled out the New Rochelle receipt stating which shots Surfer had been given on what date and the fee I had been charged and had paid.

This is not a normal filing experience in my house.

This is a miraculous filing experience in my house.

So the crisis passed, and we all started joking about just exactly how cooperative I would have been with the animal control folks if they'd come to kill my dog because I couldn't find the paperwork.

They're not taking my dog, I said.

We weren't exactly sure how that would work — secret compartments in the bedroom attic?

Secret compartments and no-bark collars?

Not sure. All I knew was that Surfer would be staying with me.

In the end, the raccoon wasn't rabid. The animal control officers had thought he might be because healthy raccoons don't hang around people's houses during the day.

But he wasn't. I still think about him from time to time, about the way he looked caught in our bush, facing the officers.

I'm happy we'll have plans to evacuate pets with their people.

^* Today I believe that the animal control officer simply did not want to put me in the position of possibly having to lose both dogs. I don't know this. I assume it.



-- CatherineJohnson - 11 Oct 2006

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