People Are Animals, Too

Anyone who does animal rescue needs to see the documentary Mine, about people trying to reunite with their pets in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Even if you don’t have animals, it’s a powerful statement on perseverance, how humans treat each other, and the meaning of home. For rescuers, it’s a powerful magnifying glass about the ways people are affected by animal rescue.

Before I saw the film, I wrote about the premise for the documentary over on the Change.org blog. I thought it could tell an important story about the connection between people and their pets, particularly in crisis situations, and the complications of custody battles. It did. But it also told the story of how people are treated when it comes to animal rescue. And it’s not always pretty.

People in rescue don’t have a ton of resources and usually don’t have much information on the animals we’re rescuing. We get in, we help the animal, we get out. Then we move on to trying to find the animal a good home so we can help more because the pool of animals in need is bottomless. As a group, we’re doing the best we can with what we have.

On the whole, we are a very judgmental group. Even those of us who try to keep an open mind tend to read between the lines of an animal’s situation and assume we know the type of people who caused it. We’ve seen enough abuse and abandonment to have good reason to be cynical. Our fellow humans rarely get the benefit of the doubt.

Mine highlights a group of people who suffered from these judgments. Hurricane Katrina was a unique situation in many ways, but the way people were treated was not.

Rescuers made judgments about the entire pet owning population of New Orleans, and many decided that “Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that ever happened for these animals.” For some of the abused, that may be true. They got a second chance when their suffering might not have otherwise been discovered. You can find those cases in any city, in any state in this country. But many of the rescued animals had been in homes where they were loved. Why keep those pets from their families only to add them to a shelter system where 6-8 million animals are euthanized every year because there aren’t enough homes?

New Orleans residents who were literally forced to leave their homes without their animals, who were told they would be allowed to return in a day or two, who had to evacuate entire families with little-to-no means of transportation were accused of abandoning their animals by rescuers in other states who have probably never seen a natural disaster stronger than a thunderstorm.

People who lost everything, who were shuffled to emergency shelters, who had no phones, and didn’t know if or when they’d get to go home, were criticized for not being able to track down their animals (who could be anywhere in the country by this point) within the first month or two after the disaster.

People who tried for months, even years, to track down their dogs, while trying to rebuild their lives, were treated as if they didn’t care enough.

One man man finally tracked down the rescue group that had ended up with his dog, who had been adopted out by then, and the rescuer never contacted the adoptive family to inform them that their dog’s previous owner was looking for him. The adopters found out years later when the man secured a pro bono attorney to help find his dog and they were served with a court order.

We rarely get to see ourselves, and our flaws, larger than life on a movie screen. Even more rare is getting into the lives of the people we deal with when trying to help animals. Yet every single animal we help has been a part of someone’s life.

Sometimes the people involved ignored the animal’s suffering, or caused it. Sometimes they are every bit as uncaring and undeserving of an animal’s love as we think they are. But sometimes, it’s not that simple.