Thursday, September 08, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Nevada medics open hearts to the helpless

Guard members care for evacuees' pets after the storm

Medics with the Nevada Army and Air National Guards treated animals, as well as people, displaced by the hurricane. Spec. Matt McGauran feeds 4-day-old Louis, who was named after the airport. The kitten's mother had jumped from an evacuating helicopter. Joey Begay holds his pit bull, Harley, while she gets a blood transfusion at the veterinary aid station at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport. Harley later was transferred to a veterinary clinic. Kacey Rimkus, 10, holds Cuddles, her 4-year-old rabbit, at the triage area at the airport. Evacuees and their pets were airlifted to the airport for treatment. The veterinary aid station handled as many as 60 pets a day, around the clock. Eric Colopy pets his dog Sandy at New Orleans International Airport. His five dogs got a clean bill of health from Nevada National Guard members who staffed a veterinary aid station for evacuees' pets at the airport. Las Vegan Naomi Raap of the Nevada Army National Guard kisses Katrina, who was thrown into the arms of a woman being evacuated by helicopter. Photos by Jeff Scheid.

NEW ORLEANS

They are among Hurricane Katrina's most helpless victims, caught amid nature's fury and the collapse of a society not of their making.

Some were left to fend for themselves. Others were never abandoned by their trusty caretakers. Still more suffered the mental scars of a world gone crazy.

They are the countless dogs, cats and other pets that have suffered just as helplessly as the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by last week's brutal storm.

"A lot of the pets are in pretty good shape. Most are in better shape than the people that they're coming with," Nevada Army National Guard Spec. Matt McGauran of Las Vegas said this week. "The people are smelling a lot worse than the animals. And the animals are better fed."

Until Wednesday, McGauran and other medics from Nevada's Army and Air Guards ran a veterinary aid station at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, which was set up as a field hospital and a first stop for people evacuated in the storm's wake.

McGauran and his peers weren't assigned to the veterinary aid station. Rather, they unilaterally took it over after it was abandoned by a federal emergency veterinary team that was shipped out of the airport last weekend.

"But we still had people coming in with animals," said Nevada Guard Spec. Michael Steckbauer, 33, a University of Nevada, Reno medical student who was doing a rotation at the valley's Sunrise Hospital when he was called to duty last week.

So McGauran, Steckbauer and other fellow Nevada Guard medics stepped into the breach, along with a Nevada Air Guardsman from Reno and a soldier from Texas.

"There was something that needed to get done. We didn't want to see the animals not treated at all," McGauran said.

Most of the vet staff members were trained to treat people, not animals, but they made the transition once they could be spared.

McGauran, a medic, is studying to be a physician's assistant at Touro University, a private school in Henderson. He also rescues abandoned animals with his wife, a veterinary nurse.

"I have a lot of experience working with animals on my own time. There was a need there, so we jumped into doing it," he said.

The clinic handled as many as 60 pets a day, around the clock.

"Mostly dogs and cats," McGauran said. "There were a couple of parrots. We did have a little girl with a rabbit."

The vet staff performed mostly simple wellness checks before the pets were put onto buses or planes out of town.

"The biggest thing is dehydration. A lot have fleas," McGauran said. "Eye problems. Real basic first aid stuff."

He added: "Where initially a lot of the animals were strays that people were finding out there, now it's people bringing their pets."

Like Eric Colopy, 43, of St. Bernard Parish. His five dogs -- Sandy, Scooby, Shaggy, Andy and Tasha -- received a clean bill of health after being picked up Monday night at the end of a remarkable weeklong odyssey.

After the storm hit, "I'd been in my boat, running back and forth every day" between flooded homes and a school being used as a shelter, Colopy said.

"I could hear people banging on the attics. I had my axe. I was busting holes in the rooftops, getting them on the roofs," he said. The day after the storm struck, "I must have busted 25, 30 holes in the roof.

"I took little breaks in between. I'd check on the dogs for 20 minutes," he said. "Sunday, maybe picked up one or two stragglers. After that, I didn't hear nobody banging."

On Monday, with the neighborhood almost deserted, a helicopter flew over his house and asked if he needed a lift. He asked if he could bring the dogs. The crew said yes. "I said, 'Yes sir,' " Colopy recalled.

When he called his wife, who has been staying with relatives in Texas and did not know whether her husband had made it, she first asked how the dogs were doing, he said.

The pets screened at the airport got first-class medications -- people meds, in fact. Few veterinary supplies were left behind, but an adjacent medical clinic opened its stash and resources to the vet staff.

That came in handy this week, when an anemic pit bull named Harley was able to get oxygen, steroids and blood tests. "Your standard vet clinic does not have that capability," Steckbauer said.

Not only were some pets suffering physically, a few appeared to be traumatized mentally.

At the Morial Convention Center's evacuation site on Monday, a woman walked in with a dog that kept bobbing its head as it walked. When seated, the dog kept bobbing, its tail straight between its legs.

"He's been like that ever since the storm," the dog's owner said.

"It's almost like a post-traumatic stress disorder," Steckbauer said. "This is a really touchy area. The field of veterinary psychology, it's very hard.

"They can't talk to you. You have to go by how they act," he said.

One sign of distress is "hypervigilance," he said, like that shown by the bobbing dog.

Other dogs at the convention center had to be dragged by their leashes toward ear-splitting helicopters.

"The animals are scared to death of helicopters," McGauran said.

Finding homes for strays was easy.

"We have people lined up waiting for animals, among the relief workers, the medics, the security guards," McGauran said. "I don't think a single animal has lasted five minutes out here without somebody adopting it."

The sight of puppies and kittens was a welcome one for weary relief workers who saw more than their share of misery as of late.

"Everybody sees the pets, they smile," McGauran said. "It's good for the morale."

So were pet-naming contests. An orphaned 4-day-old cat, whose mother had jumped out of a helicopter, on Tuesday was named Louis, after the airport. A pup of the anemic dog got the moniker Nola, short for New Orleans, La.

And then there was the name that would always link an adopted pet with the day it found a home.

"I can't begin to guess how many animals are named Katrina after this," McGauran said.

Review-Journal reporter Omar Sofradzija was on assignment in Louisiana, following a contingent of Nevada's National Guard.