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•Rev. 9.6.07 Copyright ANIMAL PEOPLE, INC. 1992--2007
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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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SEPTEMBER 2007
This Month In Humane History
BY MERRITT CLIFTON
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Looking backward only two years, to the humane response to Hurricane Katrina and the inundation of New Orleans, is worthwhile to celebrate and learn from the effort. The soil erosion that afflicted much of the U.S. Midwest during the 1930s after decades of excessive plowing and deforestation is remembered today for the Dustbowl, a broad region stretching from the Dakotas through Oklahoma and into north Texas. The fierce winds that whipped repeatedly through the Dustbowl caused it to become known as well as Tornado Alley, and the thick deposits of blown-away topsoil that formed on every surface hundreds of miles away led to the entire epoch being called “The Dirty Thirties.” |
A lone canine struggles to survive the Katrina waters.
Reflections on Katrina |
Largely forgotten is that the loss of topsoil was immediately followed by some of the most devastating floods in U.S. history.
One of those floods roared down the Ohio and Missisippi rivers in February 1937. Eric H. Hansen, then in his seventh year as chief executive of the Humane Society of Missouri, was alerted to the disaster by shortwave radio, but hesitated to organize animal relief efforts from fear that fundraising for the animal victims “would have drawn an editorial on the theme ‘Why worry about animals when human lives are at stake?’”, he wrote six months later.
Meanwhile, Hansen noted, the St. Louis newspapers were filled with “pictures of marooned animals looking very pitiful, apparently doomed to die either by drowning or starvation.”
Eventually the photographs brought a wave of letters to the newspapers asking why the humane society was not doing something.
Belatedly recognizing that the public supports humane societies when humane societies actively and ambitiously help animals in distress, Hansen and veterinarian C.F. Brenner drove to Cairo, Illinois, where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sought to save downstream cities by dynamiting the Bird Point levee.
The strategy was the same as when the Corps of Engineers diverted floodwaters into low-lying neighborhoods of New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: to divert and slow the flooding rather than risk more extensive and even more catastrophic damage.
As in New Orleans, the residents of the flooded area barely had time to evacuate. About 250 people did not succeed, and drowned. As raising chickens and pigs was then routine in low-income suburbs , thousands of animals were left to fend for themselves. Typically, Hansen reported, they were trapped and drowned on the upper floors of houses and barns.
Appealing to the human victims for help on behalf of the animals brought more volunteers than Hansen could coordinate. Among them, they rescued 1,081 mules, 941 cattle, 30 horses, 51 pigs, 16 goats, and enough dogs to have occupied “50 good dog catchers,” Hansen wrote, “but there were none available.”
Several hundred dogs were captured with the help of Works Progress Administration laborers, who housed them all in kennels improvised from the grandstand at the East Prairie Ball Park.
Remarkable as the rescue effort itself was, the notes Hansen published in the October 1937 edition of The National Humane Review were in retrospect more remarkable, for anticipating the need for the humane movement to produce and rehearse regional disaster relief plans, and suggesting as result of his experience that disaster relief work could increase the funding and prestige of the entire humane cause.
Hansen pointed out along the way that this had also been the vision of AHA cofounder William O. Stillman, who had started the American Red Star Animal Relief division of the American Humane Association in 1916.
In ensuing months, Hansen moved from the Humane Society of Missouri to head the AHA. Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, Hansen left the AHA to head the Massachusetts SPCA, where he remained for 30 years.
After making his recommendations of October 1937, Hansen seems to have done little to follow them up.
Instead, his career at the MSPCA in particular included building financial security at cost of forming questionable alliances with hunters and animal agriculture, dismantling the aggressive wildlife advocacy and humane education programs for which the MSPCA was previously known.
The humane community was no better prepared in June 1957 for Hurricane Audrey than it had been for the Cairo flood of 1937. Hitting the same region as Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Audrey nearly erased the Louisiana coastal communities of Grand Chenier, Creole, and Cameron from the map.
Officially, 390 human bodies were found. The actual death toll easily exceeded 400, about 40% of the Katrina toll at a time when the region held far fewer than 40% as many people. Whole families were swept out to sea, with no one left to report the missing.
Among the never identified victims was a teenaged girl who drowned clutching a puppy she tried to rescue.
The AHA and the Humane Society of Southwestern Louisiana in Lake Charles were able to rescue just 58 dogs and six cats from the disaster area.
Both human and animal victims were hastily buried in mass graves.
Serious humane preparation for disaster did not really get started until after Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992.
Looking ahead to the anticipated effects of global warming, including a significant rise in ocean and tidal surge levels, one might project that Katrina was just the beginning of a probable series of comparable coastal disasters.
The humane community was relatively well prepared for Katrina, and collectively did much better in aiding the animal victims than the human services sector did in helping the people.
Yet, as in coping with the Dustbowl, no amount of improved response capacity can adequately substitute for working to prevent human-caused disasters before they happen.
The humane community did not know before the Dirty Thirties what the consequences of practicing animal-intensive agriculture and feed crop cultivation on the western Great Plains would be. But we do know now what the contribution of animal agriculture is to global warming––more than the cumulative contribution of transportation, according to the United Nations Environment Program in a landmark analysis called Livestock’s Long Footprint––and we may yet have time to prevent many a crisis, even if some of the effects of global warming are already upon us.
This Month In Humane History is a www.AnimalPeopleNews.org online feature produced to promote awareness and appreciation that some people have always cared enough about animals to act on their behalf.