29/08/2021
Before responding to some of the emails you may be getting for Hurricane Ida please note this important message from our Houston friends . Kindly donate to these organizations that help keep owners and pets together.
Some thoughts from our Executive Director, Salise:
"Ok y’all, real talk about hurricanes.
I’ve talked to my Louisiana contacts last night and this morning. Here’s the deal: they are begging us to NOT scoop up Louisiana animals and scatter them. They have to be concerned about out-of-state groups coming in and taking animals out. There was a 14% reunification rate of families and pets 16 years ago in Katrina because we all made that mistake.
The Louisiana teams that FFL came to work with through Harvey—and later—are AMAZING. They have the ability to evacuate the 12 coastal parishes in 24 hours. This means animals, too.
We worked with a stellar team including Red Cross, National Guard and more to write the national cohabitation manual. friends4life.org/disastertoolkit
I was deployed in Katrina and worked in NOLA and Mississippi. I’ve been deployed as disaster response in every major Gulf storm since. The FFL team ran the first ever cohabitation shelter (people and animals together) in the United States during Harvey. We ran it with ZERO distemper and ZERO loss of connection between families and animals.
We learned a great deal in Katrina and the most important thing was that our terrible 14% reunification rate industry-wide was the result of outside groups rushing in to grab animals (and let’s face it, funding) and separating people from their pets.
So here’s the deal: you may already be getting emails urging you to get some Louisiana animals and drive them somewhere else. You may being asked to donate to non-Louisiana based groups to get Louisiana animals out.
My recommendation is don’t. There are Louisiana teams that will need support post-storm.
If you’d like, I’m happy to relay what our Department of Agriculture (they are the LA State agency in charge of animals) contact request. They are pretty busy right now.
If there are ways that FFL can help, rest assured we will. But first, we will listen."
A Template for the Nation – Cohabitated Sheltering for humans and animals who are living together during a disaster/
