Regarding Volunteering/Donations for Animals in LA Post-Gustav/Ike

The following information came to me, Ann, directly. This is not second-hand information. This needs to be posted to all the rescue-related Yahoo! groups that have had the multiple messages posted about assistance in LA.

It has been suggested that when someone makes a request such as this one, someone should e-mail or call the rescue requesting assistance and let them know that they can contact LSART or LASPCA, or even PetsMart Charaties, and let them know what they need.

The first part I'm pasting below is what was posted to another blog I have. I had been cross-posting the many requests for assistance that were posted to the many animal rescue boards to which I belong & to my other blog, before I started this one. The second is a direct reply from the same poster to me, after I sent her an e-mail in response to her post to my blog. I was asking for some clarification. I was wondering if this was applied to evacuations only, to evacuations and rescue from areas greatly affected, or to pretty much all before and after, including those requesting donations of things such as the dog food and other items requested in the post mentioned above. She has been absolutely wonderful and very helpful.

Here we go:

1st:

Just wanted to let you know that all of the evacuations from Louisiana and offers to help, need to be coordinated through Dr. Renee Poirrier with LSART and the lead agency for all evacuations and rescue dispatching is LASPCA in New Orleans. If you want to help in Louisiana in the future you will need to contact and register with them first and not just "show up" to help. They have gotten very strict since Katrina and will not tolerate folks working outside the system. They did arrest a few folks during Gustav for just this reason. I know it sounds harsh, but in order to make such a huge evacuation work effectively you need to work under the Incident Command System. This ensures that animals are moved to safety in a safe manner and that resources are not wasted. I worked Gustav and our group evacuated close to 700 animals in two day previous to Gustav and the only problem we encountered were people showing up in Ryder trucks or other vehicles that were not appropriate for transport unannounced or bringing supplies that were either not needed or to the wrong place.

I strongly recommend that if you want to help in disasters in the future that you take any or all of the classes offered by several of the organizations that have experience in disaster response. Some of these groups are:

United Animal Nations-EARS
Best Friends
The Humane Society of the United States-NDART
Noah's Wish
ASPCA

Most of the gulf coast states will not allow unaffiliated or un-credentialed volunteers into their states. It is becoming very serious to them and they ARE and WILL either arrest you or kick you out of the state. Just after Gustav hit, some people were out "rescuing" animals from peoples yards and these animals did not need "rescuing" their owners were home and they were basically stolen from people. They had as many as 5 or six people that ran into the city to get the same dog or cat because someone cross posted an email and no one knew what was going on and there was not main contact to verify that the animal really needed help or where he had been taken to. Imagine if it were your animal and you came home to find him gone and had no idea who had him or where he was.

I know all of you have huge hearts and want to help and this really is the best way to do it. So please get trained and get involved with one or all of these groups (volunteering for several is a great idea!) You will help more animals in their time of need and put resources to their best use!

2nd:

Everyone that wants to help before and after a disaster should go through the main agency, in this case LSART or LASPCA. They have a person that is in charge of things like donations, offers to foster, transport needs, medical needs, etc. Basically one clearing house for all animal issues. What tends to happen if everyone goes off on their own is, let's say someone posts on some blog or sends out an email that they need cat food sent to help Jefferson Parrish. The next thing you know, there are 1000 bags of cat food being delivered, but the cats have all been relocated to another shelter. In Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina, someone sent an email that said the animals were suffering from dehydration and we needed fluids.......we ended up with trucks full of fluids and it took 3 or 4 people that could have been helping work in the shelter to just unload and put it all in a warehouse! If they had checked with the State vets office (they were lead for animals issues in Mississippi) they could have saved tons of money, effort and fuel because they would have been told that we really only had a few that needed fluids and that had been taken care of a week ago! Like I said, people have big hearts, but if they just go off on their own, they waste so much time, money and resources just to sort and manage the donations. We literally had to hire fork lift drivers to move mountains of supplies that we could not use and most of it went to waste. People showed up to transport animals in vehicles that were not appropriate all the time. We had one group that showed up to take some dogs and the had a flatbed trailer that they had sectioned of with chicken wire into little cubicles and were planning to drive animals across 6 states like that!! Then they got mad because I said they could not take any animals until they found a safe form of transport for them! I felt bad they really thought they were doing a good thing and their hearts were in the right place, but...........we could not allow the animals to be loaded into an unsafe vehicle with not protection from weather and in unsafe holding cages. So, I would encourage everyone to go through LSART or at the very least contact LSPCA who is the lead companion animal agency for Louisiana.

Bottom Line:

You must go through LSART or LASPCA to help in Louisiana unless you are with one of the following groups who, it appears, may contact you to join them, having coordinated through LSART or LASPCA themselves:
United Animal Nations-EARS
Best Friends
The Humane Society of the United States-NDART
Noah's Wish
ASPCA

That means that the other organizations are kind of going "rouge". You can notify them that they should contact LSART or LASPCA for assistance.

For more information, visit the website for LSART, www.lsart.org