Post-Katrina Pet Custody Conflicts Exposed in New Documentary

What if you were separated from your dog and, after finally finding him again, weren't allowed to get him back? What if he was all you had left in the world, and it had never been your choice to leave him in the first place?

This is exactly what happened to thousands of pets and their people during Hurricane Katrina, the disaster that keeps on giving. Mine is a new documentary out this month that chronicles the journey of several animals from post-hurricane rescue through post-rescue custody battles.

Filmmaker Geralyn Pezanoski didn't travel to New Orleans to make this documentary. She was there to get public service announcement footage of the animal rescue and adoption operations. But she soon discovered that the story was much more complicated.

Human and animal welfare organizations were ill-prepared for the magnitude of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Shelters weren't prepared to take people with pets. Many people were taken from their homes by boats and helicopters, forced to leave their beloved dogs and cats behind. They didn't know when or if they'd be back. They were stuffed in the Super Dome, shuffled around to temporary shelters, or sent to out-of-state family and friends, with no idea of what had happened to their pets.

Meanwhile, animal rescue groups sent volunteers house to house to save whatever animals they could and bring them to temporary shelters. As hard as they tried to document where the 15,000 animals came from, it was impossible.

Then the animals needed a place to go. The shelters in the region were struggling to care for the animals they had before the storm; there was no way they could handle the influx.

The transport of Katrina dogs around the country was controversial among many rescuers, too. But people wanted to pitch in, to help those who had lost so much. The paper trail became even more tangled as dogs were sent far away from the hurricane zone.

There were several efforts to create lost-and-found databases, but there was never any effective centralized system. Some people found their animals within weeks or months. For others it was years ... or never. The longer it took, the more the dogs and cats had settled into their new lives, the more their new families had bonded with them.

But what if the original guardians finally tracked them down?

After everything else they'd been through -- the animals, the New Orleans residents, the rescuers, and the adopters -- many of them were thrown into custody battles. The original guardians saw a chance at reuniting with part of the past they'd lost. The adopters who had worked hard to give these animals a second chance wanted to see them move beyond the tragedy, to get to live their happy new lives.

What do you do when two families love, and claim, the same animal?

My own Katrina foster dog came with an address (he was the pit bull giving a volunteer a face washing during an NPR interview at the temporary Lamar-Dixon shelter). I was both thrilled and apprehensive the day I was contacted with potential owner information. What if he been intentionally abandoned? What if he had been mistreated before the storm? On the other hand, his owners had most likely lost their home, and maybe they wouldn't lose everything if they could be reunited with their dog.

As it turned out, the people at the address were looking for two dogs, but neither was the one in my house. We never found his original owners, but he's living a happy, spoiled life with his adopted family.

As Mine shows, it wasn't so simple for many of the rescued animals and their past and present companions. Some of these stories still don't have an ending. All I know is when the film comes to my town, I'll be in the theater, hoping this documentary can help us learn from our mistakes both in disaster relief and everyday rescue.