I wrote a bunch of posts about Hurricane Katrina. I didn’t bother to highlight all of them, it really doesn’t matter so much. I wanted to provide one comment/question and to point out a story that I came across.
In one of my posts about Katrina I mentioned my questions about the impact of the hurricane and its destruction upon the justice system in the areas that were hit. I wondered if some people avoided prosecution because the evidence against them was destroyed and I am curious if anything has been written about that.
The story I saw was this one:
Katrina Aftermath Includes Puppy Boom
“GULFPORT, Miss. – Puppies are popping up everywhere amid the rubble left by Hurricane Katrina — and animal welfare workers on the northern Gulf Coast fear it is only the start of a big boom in dog births.Officials say more than 6,000 pets were saved after Katrina came ashore Aug. 29, and many of them were relocated to homes elsewhere in the country. An unknown number drowned in the floodwaters or died later of injuries.
But thousands of animals remain, running loose in neighborhoods where fences were flattened and many owners are gone.
“I’ve never seen so many puppies in my life,” said Manny Maciel, an animal control officer from New Bedford, Mass., who made two trips to help trap loose dogs and cats in New Orleans and Mississippi.
Earlier this month, Maciel pulled 10 puppies and their mother from beneath a porch in a hard-hit section of Biloxi. He found seven puppies and seven dogs during another shift.
Maciel took all the dogs to the Humane Society of South Mississippi, where a shelter built for 75 animals now holds about 250 dogs and cats, including nearly 50 puppies. The shelter is the largest one on the Mississippi coast.
Workers have yet to see a spike in cat births, but there’s no doubt about what dogs have been doing since the hurricane, said Tara High, executive director of the nonprofit group.
“We’re beginning to get litters now,” High said. “It’s a lot of puppies, and it’s not puppy season.”
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