We’re reliving history already: Several shipments of non-pits have already moved to adoption programs in northern states including CO and MI, but the pit bulls are being held back with the lepers - the strays and the hw+ cases.

Arlene - about donations. My money would probably go to Best Friends, because knowing them, they’ll set up a special facility a la Tylertown for the dogs that are overlooked. Or send it to whoever is in the best position to put a real live spay/neuter program in place in nola. One of the most unforgivable sins of the Katrina clean up is no one thought to go in and fix nola’s animals while the city was still under-populated with pets.

Good reminder about the second number. I’ll pass it on to some blogs where I know there are folks in contact with ours down in the storm zone. I have a second number on my dog’s chip to the no-kill shelter by me because they know her and that’s where she was adopted from. I put it on just in case, in hopes she would avoid the city shelter if for some strange reason she was “picked up”. She also wears a tag from there on all her collars along with a reg ID tag. I also have one collar with my cell imprinted on the collar for easy reading.

I hope we’ll be able to put forth some good suggestions before long.

And Heather, your story just typifies the triumph of dogma over common sense. I don’t care if it WAS an e-collar! It was that girl’s ticket home. Sheesh.

She was wearing a locator collar (the kind used by coonhunters) with a brass nameplate on it, two phone numbers and the owner’s name.

Both phone numbers were dead — like 80% of of the phones in that county ten days out post-Katrina. I even recognized the bolted-on brass plate, as I buy mine from the same hunting dog supplier, and tried to get hold of the company to see if they could provide an address. Cell phone was still too dodgy at that point, and I never got through to them.

PUT A PHONE NUMBER ON YOUR PET FOR A FRIEND OR RELATIVE WHO IS OUT OF YOUR REGION.

Because a big disaster is going to affect you, and your next door neighbor, and your dog’s vet, and your Mom in the next town. A clear-minded friend a few states away, someone who can authorize vet treatment, someone you can call from wherever you spattered to when it all hit the fan, is ideal.

The other thing that drove me mad was that “helpful” people kept taking the locator collar off the dog. Of course it had a dead battery at that point, but it was the dog’s only possible ticket home, as it had her owner’s name.

Why did people keep taking it off? “Poor thing is wearing a shock collar.” I kept showing them that it was a radio receiver, had no probes and was not a shock collar, and had a dead battery anyway. Every time I’d come back to base, there it would be, on a table instead of on that hound.

SO MICROCHIP AND TATTOO AS WELL AS COLLAR AND TAG.

That 10 percent rule is pretty incredible, and I hadn’t heard that in detail before. It is beyond sad to me that the pibbles who survive the storm will die in shelters hundreds and thousands of miles away because no one will take a chance on them.

Maybe in the post-Vick era, more organizations will.

Our biggest storm headaches came from some of the shelter teams who scoured through the barns like thrift store shoppers on a deadline, looking for anything in a small-medium size that didn’t resemble a pit bull so they could fill up their quota and get the hec home.

People were so fluffy-myopic that organizers soon recognized that they were going to be stuck with a massive left-over problem. So, a new rule was scribbled on in the export boards: ‘Every departing export load had* to include at least 10% pit bulls’…a modest toll charge for their right to be heroes back home. Of course, most of those 10% were trucked to their deaths. We can’t begin to fathom how many were fished out of dark waters only to be transported, warehoused, then quietly destroyed in other states. Thousands. THOUSANDS.

Thank dog pet owners can take their pets with them this time, but we can guarandamntee that homeless but adoptable pit bulls are going to inconvenience more somebodies all over again on their way to being dead.

Pets Not Left Behind

http://preview.tinyurl.com/58p4b9