Dr. Mixson with a new friend from Mississippi

On August 29th, 2005, the Category 5 Hurricane Katrina made landfall leaving a trail of devastation particularly in the city of New Orleans and its surrounding area. Katrina caused 1,392 fatalities but what wasn’t much reported was the stranding of between 100,000 and 250,000 pets and the deaths of between 70,000 and 150,000 pets[1]. As part of an effort to save the stranded pets, a group of veterinarians from the Washington, DC area traveled to Mississippi. My daughter, Dr. Anne Mixson, was one of the veterinarians. Upon her return she told me she had never seen such devastation and there were dogs and cats roaming amongst the ruins. After several days their team managed to save 63 dogs which they brought back to DC where they helped any injured then worked to either find the dogs owners or people to adopt them.

There was a website that was setup that had photos and descriptions of the animals which owners could go to locate their lost pets. To help, Anne provided me with a list of the dogs with their photos and descriptions and I spent a couple of days entering the information into the system.  Over the following couple of months, a number of the pets were reunited with their owners and the ones for which no owner was found, were adopted.

[1] Animal Welfare Institute, Quarterly report, Winter 2007

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