Dauphin Island Times

For those of us who have pets, we know they're like members of the family. Faced with the choice between leaving them behind to face a natural disaster alone or risking your own life to help assure his or her safety, many people in the path of Hurricane Katrina chose to stay with their pets - to keep their families together.

All along the Gulf Coast, many people who didn't evacuate for Hurricane Katrina say they stayed because of their pets.

"You couldn't take the dog to the shelter, and I wasn't leaving my dogs," Wendy Morgan said two days after Katrina's Aug. 29 landfall. Morgan's husband, Clint, stayed in their Slidell, La., home with two dogs, braving chest-high storm surge.

Similar stories can be heard from New Orleans all the way to Mobile -- people who remained with animals that they view as family members, instead of abandoning them.

While it's unclear how many of the storm's 1,000-plus casualties died because they stayed behind with their pets, the question of how animals influence potentially life-or-death evacuation decisions is among the troubling issues Katrina spotlighted.

"People are literally dying because they won't leave their pets," said Anne Culver, director of disaster services for the Humane Society of the United States, based in Washington, D.C."

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