Pet rescuers learned lessons from Katrina

Stranded animals relocated to make room in Texas.

HOUSTON — The big-rig truck was full of cats. Theo, who had a bit of a sneeze. Vennessa, who was acting like a diva. Two Thomases. And Buck, who, to everyone’s surprise, was a girl.

They had been living in shelters in southeast Texas. But with Hurricane Harvey leaving untold numbers of family pets stranded, these cats were being shipped to an emergency shelter across the country to free space in local facilities for animals being plucked from the floodwaters.

Harvey has initiated a mass shuffling of thousands of shelter animals. They’re making room so that rescued pets can stay in their hometowns, increasing the chances that they will be reunited with their owners, who are displaced themselves, said Kenny Lamberti, vice president of the companion animals department of the Humane Society of the United States.

“The priority is keeping the rescued pets with their families,” Lamberti said.

Animal rescuers, he said, are acting on lessons learned during Hurricane Katrina, when abandoned animals were turned away from shelters that became too full and were not allowed in many human evacuation centers. Back then, volunteers from other states, though well-intentioned, took stranded pets with them to their home clinics, making it difficult for owners to find them, said Lamberti, who adopted a Katrina-displaced pit bull mix he named Rubin Hurricane Carter.

On Friday, Emancipet, a low-cost veterinary clinic in a strip mall on southeast Houston’s Wayside Drive, became a feline way station when the big rig from the Humane Society pulled up with 30 cats from Dickinson and League City near the coast that were being relocated to Seattle after those towns flooded.

The clinic was transformed into a veritable cat triage center, an assembly line of care in which the animals were weighed and examined before being placed in cages outfitted with litter boxes and toys. They would all be spayed or neutered and microchipped as needed at Emancipet before they headed northwest.

“Six-point-nine pounds,” one of the technicians said, weighing a dark gray cat before giving it a hug.

“She’s a girl!” Dr. Adrian Knowles said, laughing, after getting a good look at the cat whose papers said it was named Buck. “Check the genders, people.”

Emancipet took in 13 cats from the municipal animal shelter in League City, a town that was hard-hit by flooding.

Kim Schoolcraft, the League City shelter’s animal services manager, said her facility had taken in about 35 cats and dogs since the storm hit. A third of them had been reunited with their families, and one cat, which was brought in with facial injuries, died of hypothermia, she said.

It’s been a “massive effort” to move animals to and from the facility, which has offered to house the claimed pets of displaced families for a month without charge, she said.