Cape Cod Volunteers Rescue Pets | CapeCodOnline.com
During the recent historic floods in Tennessee, most residents near the swollen Mississippi River were evacuated to safety. But in the rush to get to higher ground, many had to abandon their pets, leaving volunteers — including many from Cape Cod — to rescue them from devastated homes and flooded streets. “The human element is bad, but there’s an animal tied to almost everybody,” Mashpee fire Capt. Joe Fellows said. Fellows, a 20-year veteran of the department and longtime volunteer with the Cape Cod Stranding Network, used vacation time May 9-17 to volunteer in Memphis, Tenn., with the American Humane Association’s Red Star Animal Emergency Services group. Organizations from the Cape also had a hand in saving the four-legged survivors of the floods, including the International Fund for Animal Welfare and the Cape Cod Disaster Animal Response Team (DART). Every morning, volunteers woke up with the sun and didn’t rest until sundown, Fellows said. “All we saw was the hotel, the highway and the shelter,” said Holly Rogers, president and founder of Cape Cod DART. Rogers traveled with four other volunteers to Tennessee for a week, returning on May 21. Another DART volunteer went down three weeks ago, she said. Fellows and other search-and-rescue volunteers went through the neighborhoods north of Memphis, he said, sometimes checking homes based on neighbors’ tips that animals were still there. “We went from one place to the other, launching our little boats and basically going door to door,” he said. In the area he searched, which received the brunt of the damage from overflowing tributaries of the Mississippi, water reached up to first-floor windows, Fellows said. “It was mind-boggling to see a full bass boat just gunning down the street,” he said. Back at the makeshift shelter, housed in an office park she likened to Independence Park in Hyannis, around 35 volunteers from different organizations took care of about 170 animals that had been rescued, Rogers said. In the two weeks American Humane Association volunteers were in Tennessee, 192 animals were sheltered, spokesman Mark Stubis said. Of those, 50 were rescued by volunteers, including Fellows, who roamed the flooded streets of the Memphis suburbs, Stubis said. Happily, Rogers said, around a dozen pets were reunited with their owners while she was there, while others came to see their pets but chose to keep them sheltered while they found housing. Those reunions made the trip worthwhile despite difficult hours and sad times where sick or injured animals had to be euthanized, Rogers and Fellows said. “For some people, their pets were all they had left “» and they were simply overwhelmed that we were coming from all over the United States to help their pets come through this,” Rogers said.
SHELTERed
The American Humane Association and volunteers from other organizations rescued and sheltered 192 animals in the recent Tennessee floods:
- 121 dogs, including 14 puppies
- 66 cats, including 11 kittens
- 1 hamster
- 2 birds
- 2 ducks
Source: American Humane Association
Cape Cod Disaster Animal Response Team 