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Katrina victims in anguish over lost pets

As Valerie Bennett was evacuated from a New Orleans hospital, rescuers told her there was no room in the boat for her dogs.

She pleaded.

"I offered him my wedding ring and my mom's wedding ring," the 34-year-old nurse recalled on Saturday.

They wouldn't budge. She and her husband could bring only one item, and they already had a plastic tub containing the medicines her husband, a liver transplant recipient, needed to survive.

Such emotional scenes were repeated perhaps thousands of times along the Gulf Coast last week as pet owners were forced to abandon their animals in the midst of evacuation.

In one example reported last week, a police officer took a dog from one little boy waiting to get on a bus in New Orleans.

"Snowball! Snowball!" the boy cried until he vomited.

The policeman told a reporter he didn't know what would happen to the dog.

Louisiana State Treasurer John Kennedy, who was helping with relief efforts on Saturday, said some evacuees refused to leave without their pets.

"One woman told me `I've lost my house, my job, my car and I am not turning my dog loose to starve,'" Kennedy said.

Kennedy said he persuaded refugees to get on the bus by telling them he would have the animals taken to the Lamar Dixon center in Gonzales.

The SPCA picked up two cats and 15 dogs, including one Kennedy found tied up far underneath the overpass next to an unopened can of dog food with a sign that read "Please take care of my dog, his name is Chucky."

Valerie Bennett left her dogs with an anesthesiologist who was taking care of about 30 staff members' pets on the roof of a hospital.

The doctor euthanized some animals at the request of their owners, who feared they would be abandoned and starve to death. He set up a small gas chamber out of a plastic-wrapped dog kennel.

"The bigger dogs were fighting it. Fighting the gas. It took them longer. When I saw that, I said `I can't do it,'" said Bennett's husband, Lorne.

But the anesthesiologist, a cat owner, promised to care for the other pets.

"He said he'd stay there as long as he possibly could," Valerie Bennett said, speaking from her husband's bedside at Atlanta's Emory University Hospital.

The Bennetts had four animals, including their two beloved dogs -- Lorne's English springer spaniel, Oreo, and Valerie's miniature dachshund, Lady.

On Saturday, as Hurricane Katrina approached, both went to the hospital to help and took all four animals with them.

Patients were evacuated starting on Monday by rescue workers using small boats to traverse the floodwaters surrounding the hospital. On Wednesday night, the Bennetts were told they had to go, too.

They fed their guinea pig and left it in its cage in a patient room. They couldn't refill its empty water bottle because the hospital's plumbing failed on Sunday, they said. They poured food on the floor for the cat, but again no water.

"I just hope that they forgive me," Valerie Bennett cried.
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