Special to The Legal Animal -- Legal cases concerning the return of Katrina pets are complicated by emotion, questions of what is best for the animal, and laws that were not designed to address this unique situation.
Photo: "Whisperer Al," a dog found by Best Friends in New Orleans after rescuers responded to report of a dead dog. Al has now recovered from his trauma and been adopted by a new home. Photo by Carol Guzy. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As Malvin Cavalier fights for Bandit in Pennsylvania, Lt. Jaypeth Johnson is battling to get back Missy in Texas, Deborah Marks is trying to reclaim Goldie in Illinois, the Couture family is hoping to get Master Tank and Nila back from Florida… and the list goes on.
All over the country, legal battles are cropping up between Katrina victims and the individuals and organizations who helped to save their pets after the catastrophic hurricane – but who now won’t give them back. At the same time, there are many similar situations that haven’t found their way into the legal arena, often because Katrina victims don’t have the money to hire attorneys.
It is a situation laced with irony – and tragedy. In a strange twist, the victims of Katrina have become pitted against those who originally sought to help them. Some pre-Katrina pet owners are at once filled with gratitude for those who helped save their animals, and anger, because the rescuers now refuse to return the pets they saved.
“We highly respect everything these organizations did. They did heroic things, and our hats are off to them,” says Steven Wise, a prominent Massachusetts animal rights attorney who is representing two Katrina victims, Lt. Johnson and Linda Charles, who are seeking the return of their dogs. “It is just that in the end, these organizations have to understand that the animals they rescued don’t become their property, and they have to give them back to the people who own them.”
Wise is suing two humane societies in Texas, The Humane Society of North Texas in Fort Worth and the SPCA of Texas in McKinney. The organizations have refused to reveal the locations of the dogs belonging to Johnson and Charles, saying they have been adopted to new owners.
In both these cases, Wise has obtained preliminary injunctions ordering the organizations to return the pets, although neither dog has yet been returned. See
earlier story. Unlike cases in which animals have been abused, Wise says that both parties here have their hearts in the right place.
“We are not going after anybody, and not saying they are bad people in any way, we are simply saying that we don’t agree these animals are theirs,” he says. “We are just having a good-faith disagreement as to what [the organizations’] legal responsibilities are.”
Emotions run high. Still, in most of these cases emotion runs high on both sides. Katrina victims often see their pets as all they have left to hold onto after losing so much, and view themselves as being victimized all over again.
Meanwhile, the new owners of the pets have developed deep emotional attachments to the animals, having nursed them back to emotional and physical health following their terrible ordeal. In many cases, these owners adopted the animals in good faith, believing that legally they were theirs to keep.
A case in Pinellas County, Florida, is a prime example. The Pinellas Humane Society reportedly took 288 animals back to Florida with them in September, and then adopted them out in October.
The Couture family searched for their St. Bernard, who was named Master Tank, for months, after he was given over to Camp Lucky in St. Bernard Parish for temporary care. They finally found out that he had gone to Pinellas and been adopted to someone who refuses to return him.
Dorreen Couture says the dog is missed by the whole family, including her two young grandchildren.
“I don’t understand it. How could somebody be so cruel and heartless, knowing we lost everything, all personal belongings, everything, and all we want back is our dogs?” she asks.
The new custodian of Master Tank is Hillsborough County prosecutor Pam Bondi, who says she adopted the dog in good faith and then nursed him back to health when she found he had a severe infestation of heartworms.
“He is so happy, and so well cared for now, and it is in his best interests for him to stay here,” she says.
Read more about the case of Master Tank in the next installment of this series. In these disputes, it is common for the new owners of the animals to say that the pets weren’t properly cared for by their pre-Katrina owners, and that they now have better homes. Many shelters also say that Katrina victims took too long to claim their pets, that the new owners have become too attached, and it would now be too disruptive to the pets to return them.
Do evacuees “deserve” their animals back? Some firmly believe that any Katrina evacuee who left his or her pet behind just doesn’t deserve to have the animal back.
One letter-to-the-editor in the St. Petersburg Times opines that Bondi would surely never leave Master Tank behind if she had to evacuate, and concludes about the Coutures: “It is quite obvious these people were not good pet owners and do not deserve to own animals. In my opinion, you do not deserve them back! Grow up and move on with your lives and quit blaming the Humane Society for your own negligence.”
But it’s not that simple once you hear the full story, say owner advocates who are working to bring about reunions between Katrina victims and their pets.
“I’m sure there were pets who were never given a second thought, I don’t doubt that, but I’ll tell you, once you start hearing the circumstances under which they became separated from their pets, it sort of puts a different slant on things,” says Christiane Biagi, a member of the Stealth Volunteers, a group that has facilitated well over 1,000 reunions.
Members of Stealth say they have worked with cases where owners were forced to leave their animals at gunpoint, where they stayed to care for their animals but were ultimately required to evacuate by boat, and where they faced the untenable choice of looking after their pets, or making sure that their family members were safe. Some, as in the case of the Coutures, took their animals into one of the many shelters set up in the area, so they could receive temporary care.
“I’ve always tried to see some sort of balance about it,” Biagi says. “There were bad pet owners in the Gulf States before Katrina, and there will be bad pet owners after Katrina, but it’s kind of been my experience that the folks who are really, really searching for their pets cared about their pets before the hurricane.”
Stealth volunteer Janis Callahan says those owners still pursuing their pets represent a tiny percentage of pre-Katrina owners, and are a “core group of devoted pet lovers.”
“Common sense will tell you these people who have gone through agonizing searches and heartbreak for many months, obviously love their pets. Bad owners wouldn't bother to look for their pets,” she says. “[I]t is clear we are working with the cream of the crop who think of their pets as beloved family members."
Disputes over standard of care. Some consider the Stealth Volunteers to be zealots, who will pursue the agenda of the owners regardless of the best interests of the animal. However, both Biagi and Callahan say they took into consideration the best interests of the animal when deciding whether or not to help an owner reclaim a pet.
“I am a pet rescuer first, and I will sway toward what is with the best interests of the animal,” Callahan says. “I know some animals are better off for Katrina. I’ve had some people call and ask more for help, and when they tell me the circumstances, I won’t help them.”
Still, the pet care provided by owners in the Gulf Coast reflects the culture and attitudes of the region – and in many cases, is tied to socio-economic status. Very few pets rescued from the Gulf States were spayed or neutered, a large percentage of the dogs tested positive for heartworm, and many animals were kept as outside pets, and even on chains. To many rescuers, these conditions seem unacceptable in comparison to a home where all pets are altered and up-to-date on vaccinations and heartworm preventative, and sleep with their owners in bed every night.
A real dilemma is presented in the case of an animal who was truly loved, but whose standard of care was below that considered acceptable by the animal welfare community.
Stealth volunteer Donna Thomas can understand why rescuers would not want to return an animal in these circumstances, but she thinks it is not their call to make.
“Many studies show that if a child grows up in a household that is higher on the socio-economic scale, they do better, but we can’t go en mass and take poor children and put them in rich homes, and if you can’t do it with children, you can’t do it with dogs and cats,” she says.
Thomas says rescuers need to remember their initial mission: they went to the Gulf Coast to save animals’ lives, not to deprive owners of their pets.
“I don’t believe it is the right time and place to go and rescue the dogs, and then decide they weren’t being cared for anyway, so we are just going to keep them,” she says, adding that the situation poses an excellent opportunity for education.
“I think the animal people have such good will in New Orleans, that there is a vast opportunity for animal groups to go down there and do a mass education about heartworm and spay/neuter,” she says.
What does the law say? Meanwhile, the law is often unsatisfactory to both sides – treating a pet merely as “property,” and disposing of it without regard to its best interests, or the emotional interests of the people involved.
Pre-Katrina owners and their advocates say that these animals qualify as “lost things” under Louisiana law. This means that the new custodian of an animal is bound to make a “diligent effort to locate its owner,” and that the owner has three years in which to claim the animal.
See La. C.C. Art. 3419 (2006). On the other hand, if the animals were to be considered abandoned property, the new owners can acquire immediate ownership under state law. A possession is abandoned under Louisiana law if “its owner relinquishes possession with the intent to give up ownership.”
See La. C.C. Art. 3418 (2006). According to New Orleans law, an animal is considered abandoned if the owner failed to provide food, shelter, water, and humane conditions for more than 24 hours, and an abandoned animal can be impounded by animal control and adopted or euthanized after five days.
See New Orleans City Code Sect. 18-2. Obviously, none of these laws was crafted with an eye toward the unique situation posed by Katrina, where owners were frequently forced to leave their animals behind, and the animals were certainly deprived of adequate food, shelter and water for extended periods of time.
According to the Louisiana Attorney General’s office, the animals left behind during Katrina were not “abandoned,” and the proper law to apply is the one concerning lost possessions.
“These animals were left behind by people who had no choice, they weren’t voluntarily relinquishing ownership rights, and the definition of abandoned animals does not apply in this situation,” says Mimi Hunley, the deputy attorney general assigned to deal with the disputes.
“Our official position is that we are relying on the Louisiana law that gives three years for an owner to claim unclaimed property. It sounds cold, but under Louisiana law, animals are considered property, and these owners have not relinquished their rights,” she says.
Hunley has attempted to negotiate on behalf of Louisiana citizens in many owner disputes, although she has rarely been successful in achieving an amicable resolution. Her hands are tied as far as taking the cases any further, however, because the attorney general’s office does not file lawsuits against individuals. And since the cases involve many different shelters and individuals as defendants, a class-action lawsuit is not a possibility.
HSUS memos cloud the issue. In many cases, the legal situation has been complicated by Memorandums of Understanding that receiving shelters signed when they took animals from the care of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), which operated the giant shelter at Lamar-Dixon.
These memos stipulated that the animals had to be held for their owners until October 15, and after that point they became the property of the receiving shelters, and could be adopted into new homes. Although HSUS subsequently asked shelters to extend this deadline to the end of December, that was merely a request, and not agreed to by the receiving shelters.
As a result of these agreements, October 15 has become a magic date in many of these disputes, used even by shelters that did not get their animals from HSUS or sign the memorandum. Shelters who did sign these agreements in good faith were understandably under the impression that animals could be legally adopted after that date.
However, attorneys and owner advocates say that these agreements never had any legal force to begin with, because owners were not a party to them.
“I still don’t understand why the HSUS was giving a memo of understanding, saying that shelters could give animals away after October 15, when that was not their call. I don’t understand why they thought they could override state law,” Wise says. “Probably, HSUS should have taken a better look at Louisiana law, but perhaps they didn’t have the time to do that.”
A New Jersey court ruled in
Arguello v. Behmke that one such agreement was void as a result of mutual mistake, because both the receiving shelter and HSUS mistakenly assumed they could had the right to settle ownership of the pet without consulting the owner who had signed the dog over to Lamar-Dixon for temporary care. In this case, the judge ruled that the Great Dane called "Chopper" must be returned to the Pre-Katrina owners.
Se Resources section for a copy of this decision. Law aside, owner advocates say that it was absurd to expect owners to be able to locate their widely dispersed pets by the October 15 deadline – especially since many Katrina evacuees still had no homes, phones, or Internet access at that time.
“It is a ridiculous date. People were still sitting in FEMA shelters on October 15, wondering where they would go next,” says Callahan.
Callahan says some owners believed that Petfinder.com, the primary online clearinghouse for information on lost and found Katrina pets, was a pet store in the New Orleans area where they could pick up their animals.
“Many people had no clue how to find their pets until the Best Friends reunion event in December, which was the first public drive to say here is where you can get help,” Callahan says. “Prior to that event, people were at the mercy of word of mouth, and if they happened to have a computer or a cell phone.”
If October 15 is not the magic date, however, when is? Some find it absurd to suggest that Katrina evacuees should be able to claim their pets years later, and rip them from the new homes where they have been established.
In most cases, the best recourse is to appeal for reason on both sides.
The majority of shelters have been cooperative about timely requests to return Katrina animals, and private adopters are often sympathetic to the plight of Katrina victims, and willing to return animals even if they have developed an emotional attachment.
On the other side of things, Biagi says, some owners who assumed their pets were dead are just returning home and realizing that they might have been rescued – and just beginning a search for their whereabouts.
“But a lot of the owners are very sensitive to the needs of their pets as well, and are not being unreasonable about their requests. There are folks who are asking us to look for their pet, who basically just want to know that their pet is alright,” she says. “That is a real service we can provide, and I think it is just right for them to know.”
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Coming Next: The difficult case of Master Tank.