Your Katrina Recommendations
   I have received many requests and continue to receive requests for us to link to organizations seeking donations for hurricane Katrina. I know nothing about how this money would be spent. I know there must be a desperate need I just don't know who should be recommended.
   Perhaps you can help. If you personally know of a worthy charity helping pets and/or their owners affected by Katrina and would like to help, please write a paragraph describing why they should receive a donation. I will take your descriptions and place them on a web page linked from our home pages. (Tens of thousands of people visit Dog, Cat, and Pet of the Day each day. Comparably few visit these forums.) Ideally, it would be nice to have the best organizations recommended by several knowledgeable people.
      Paul
UpDate from Animal Friends
Please, slow down with offers of help ...
September 8, 2005 : 9:58 PM ET
Your offers of help – volunteers, supplies, and everything else –
have been absolutely amazing.
In fact, in the last few days, the staff here at Best Friends have been overwhelmed with messages and offers by phone and e-mail. We’re getting 5,000 to 7,000 e-mails plus 1,000 phone calls every day. And right now, we need to take two or three days to process everything that’s still waiting. The last thing we want to do is get backed up and become just another bottleneck for people wanting to help. As we catch up, we will have a more accurate idea of the needs that we still have and we’ll again be posting our needs on our website.
So please, no more offers of volunteer help or physical supplies for the next few days.
If you don’t want to wait that long, there are other rescue organizations that may be looking for additional help or supplies. The two that we recommend in particular are Noah’s Wish which is stationed in Slidell, Louisiana, and United Animal Nations who has deployed their Emergency Animal Rescue Services (EARS) in Gonzales, Louisiana.
This is going to be a long-term effort, and we’re all still gearing up for what is yet to come. For Best Friends, this last 10 days has been mostly about emergency rescue efforts in New Orleans itself. When we arrived, the day of the hurricane itself, we found ourselves immediately in the eye of the storm, so to speak, as one of the very few animal organizations able to get access in and out of the city.
In the weeks to come, the focus will begin to shift. We’ll be looking at foster/adoption programs, reuniting pets with their families, the health care of animals who have been poisoned by the toxic waters of New Orleans, and much more.
Each day brings new challenges. For us at Best Friends, we’re breaking new ground in this rescue effort, and facing new challenges every day. Your continuing support is our lifeblood. So we will be straightforward in saying what help we can use, and when.
If you’ve been delayed in getting a response from us over the last couple of days, please accept our apologies.
Meanwhile, as ever, your donations toward the Hurricane Relief Fund are always needed – enabling us to continue the rescue effort.
Best Friends - Katrina Special Reports
