Story of boy forced to abandon dog spurs efforts is the headline of an Associated Press story by Matt Sedensky carried on the website of the Houston Chronicle, adding a few more brush strokes to the heart-rending story of conflicting rescue priorities and the fate of dogs and cats in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
I'm afraid the image of the dogs in a Mississippi animal shelter, dog-paddling for hours in their flooded pens and cages, trying to stay alive, will remain with me for the rest of my life. Amazingly, 125 animals actually survived this, in a shelter in Gulfport, MS, while 23 died.
The good news is the outpouring of concern, effort and funding to alleviate the distress of the Katrina pets as well as that of the human refugees. But no amount of good news can cancel out the multiple failures of organisation, judgment and will that caused so much preventable loss of life and resulted in so much gross misery right here in prosperous North America.
For decades now, ever since America put a man on the moon, we have been encouraged to believe that with the aid of technology, money and expertise WE CAN DO ANYTHING that we set our minds to, that whatever seems good to us to do, we can do it. Whatever seems evil to us, we can eradicate it by "declaring war on it," even if it is a conceptual, rather than a flesh-and-blood, enemy. First we had the War on Drugs. Now the War on Terrorism and somehow with it, the war to "bring democracy to Iraq." Drugs are still there. So's terrorism. Iraq's a seething mess, another tar-baby like Vietnam was in my generation.
What we set our minds to do has an unforeseen price, it seems. Money, time, effort and energy expended in these conceptual wars may or may not have had tangible positive results -- what is now obvious is that they WEREN'T expended in protecting the Gulf Coast from storm surges or modernising the levees that protect the port city of New Orleans. So, despite the new Department of "Homeland Security," in some very basic ways it looks as though the homeland isn't that secure. It was sick-making listening to FEMA bureau-rats comparing the broken New Orleans levees to "an atomic bomb." It wasn't a bomb, folks. It was a hurricane. These storms form in the Atlantic and the Caribbean every year from June to November.
Choices were made, priorities assigned, that ignored certain basic realities like hurricanes, or relegated them to third-class status. And guess what? Though maybe we can do ANYTHING, we can't do EVERYTHING. And in the wake of that little disconnect, people -- and their animal pets -- have suffered grievously... and needlessly.