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A city organizing to find temporary homes for 160 displaced puppies? A pilot falling in love with a rescued feline passenger? Dozens of states across the United States of America taking in hundreds of shelter animals, and returning the “favor” by sending pet supplies and humanitarian aid to hard hit communities?
These are just a few of the stories that illustrate how American pet rescues responded to 2024’s hurricane season, where a number of storms, most notably Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, left hundreds of people and animals displaced in the southern states.
Rhode Island fosters South Carolinian pets
The NY Post shares, after Hurricane Helene left southern communities flooded and devastated, animal rescues as far away as Rhode Island and Wisconsin, stepped up to the plate.
Dozens of organizations, including Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin-based shelters sent pet food, pet supplies, and veterinarians to the south to support the local animal rescues and pet owners affected by the storm.
Additionally, these organizations coordinated the evacuation of hundreds of animals from hundreds of miles away. A shelter in Middletown, Rhode Island, hosted 14 dogs rescued from South Carolina, while the MSPCA in Massachusetts made space for another dozen animals. The Human Animal Welfare Society in Waukesha, Wisconsin, received 100 pups and kittens evacuated from South Carolina!
Making room for locally displaced pets
The Providence Animal Center in Media, Pennsylvania, an organization that took in 20 dogs from Georgia after Hurricane Helene, told CBS News that the organization hoped to ease the burden on shelters in areas affected by the storm, by hosting their homeless animals. That way, these shelters would have space to temporarily home pets that got separated from their owners as a result of the hurricane.
"These dogs were already homeless before the hurricane," the Providence Animal Center’s Chief Operating Officer Victoria Kinden told CBS News. "What we did was open spaces for them to help in the areas that are having issues, so that they have open kennels to help those displaced dogs, so that someone can come find their pet while down there."
A news release by the Humane Society, another nonprofit involved in the animal evacuations, shared a similar message. "By transporting animals who were available for adoption pre-storm out of the region,” the release read. “Local animal services will be better positioned to take in and care for displaced animals in their community, increasing the likelihood of reunifications," the Humane Society said in the news release.
Airlifted from Asheville
The Garden & Gun shares the story of the Asheville Humane Society, a North Carolina-based shelter that airlifted their feline and canine residents to communities that hadn’t been affected by Helene. The shelter who, in the aftermath of the storm, lacked running water, received a half ton of pet supplies organized by animal rescue organizations across the country, and the opportunity to send 40 dogs and 57 cats to a Winston-Salem-based shelter.
The Asheville shelter posted on Instagram, “If we have learned anything from the past few days it is that community is everything. Help comes to us in ways big and small - and all of them mean the world to us and our animals.”
“The Bissell Pet Foundation, alongside the Forsyth Humane Society,” the post continued, “Helped us load over 100 of our animals into a plane to whisk them to safety. As we stood on the tarmac, waving goodbye to animals we love fiercely, we were filled with gratitude knowing that our animals were in capable hands.”
Colleen Daly of Asheville Humane Society told the Citizen Times.“Potable and clean water is an essential resource for keeping the animals happy and hydrated, but it’s also necessary for cleaning the kennels and ensuring that hands are sanitized in preparation for medical procedures,”
“And it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to take care of the number of animals in our care given those circumstances,” Daly shared.“This is going to be — I mean, it is — an unprecedented challenge to care for our animals.”
Or trucked to Richmond
While some of the evacuated pets flew north on airplanes, more than 100 escaped the post-Helene chaos via trucks sent to Richmond, Virginia, Fox5 reported, where they were taken in by animal shelters.
Dawn Wallace, the executive director of the Lost Dog & Cat Rescue Foundation in Tennessee, a shelter that took in some of the homeless pets, told Fox5 that their goal is to get the pets settled in the shelter just long enough to settle them out of the shelter with forever families.
"Our volunteers are here today at our Rescue Care Center in Falls Church and they’ll start being able to walk the dogs, spend time with them, give them the TLC that they deserve after a long journey. The cats and kittens will get cuddled and snuggled and lots of playtime," Wallace told Fox5. "And we will start to determine how quickly we can get them all ready for adoption."
Kinden, of Providence Animal Center, also added in a comment to CBS News, that she also hoped to find the displaced pets forever, or at least temporary homes. Community adoptions or temporary fosters, would open up space for the shelter to take in more storm-displaced pups.
"The more space we can make through foster and adoption, the more we can help," Kinden explained. "We help locally all the time, but during these big needs and these hurricanes, we want to do what we can to help all our partners."
Getting out of the way of Milton
Hurricane Helene left dozens of communities under water, without electricity, or lacking potable water and basic supplies. Hurricane Milton hit near these areas a month later. Before Milton struck West Florida, dozens of cities and towns were advised to evacuate. Fox5 reported on efforts to get not just people, but pets, out of the way of the storm before it struck.
Again, rescues across the nation responded to the call, with a SoHo, New York City-based shelter, the Best Friends Animal Society, taking in 20 pups and kittens from Florida and Georgia and looking for forever homes for them in the Northeast.
Some of these animals only got to tour the Big Apple for a short time, as they were later shipped off to Massachusetts to make more space at the Best Friends Animal Society for more storm-displaced animals.
"These life-saving transports, whether they're coming into our center or going up to our partner shelters. We all band together to support the community in times of need, so this opportunity is amazing because we're able to spread awareness as well," Manager of the Best Friends Animal Society Lexi Kaul told Fox5.
A community comes together to foster fur babies
The Medley Animal Services, a Miami-based shelter, was not in Milton’s direct path. However, since they had flooded previously, the shelter was concerned that heavy rains brought by MIlton would leave them underwater, ABC News.
The shelter reached out to the community, who responded in an unprecedented way, with locals volunteering to foster the dogs until the storm waters subsided. The Medley Animal Services was able to find foster families for 160 dogs!
Stefanie Bada, a volunteer at Medley Animal Services who was heavily involved in networking within the community to find foster placements, wrote on Tik Tok, "We did it Miami!!! 160 dogs all fostered out for 5 days to keep them safe and warm for the hurricane…No dogs left behind."
Bada’s post went viral and she later told Good Morning America, 'Okay, the dogs at the Medley Shelter need to be helped. "That shelter floods horribly when it just rains here for an hour or two, so any form of a pressure storm is really bad for these dogs. So that's when we jumped into action. And we said we need to do whatever we can to help."
"We were sending direct messages. We were sending emails to the shelter.” Bada continued. We were reaching out to volunteers. We were doing whatever we could, we really tried to promote on our page to rescue, to not shop, to rescue, to foster," she shared. "So once we started really going full speed ahead…people started to really reach out to us and say, 'Hey, we want to help.'"
Annette Jose, Director of Miami-Dade County Animal Services, told Good Morning America, the response and support they received from the community were "historic."
"I mean, they show up every day because we have so many pets being adopted from the shelter on a weekly basis, but this has been an unprecedented response from the community to come and pull our pets into safety during a storm," Jose explained adding that, "It started going from one social media platform to the other because of our volunteers, and then it was picked up by some influencers…This is the kind of thing where everybody gets inspired from it, not just the volunteers who end up taking a pet for the weekend or for the storm, but our staff themselves finally feel like they were able to make a difference in the lives of these pets."
Bada shared that she’d gotten pictures from the dog matchmaking pairs she’d arranged, showing foster families cuddling, playing, and hanging out with their foster fur babies. She hopes that some of these foster families will later choose to adopt.
Love at first flight
Avery the Kitten was a cat rescued from a storm area, who found herself a new home on a Southwest animal rescue flight, People shares.
Southwest Airlines became a partner in airlifting displaced animals from South Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida, to non-affected states and flying in humanitarian supplies in the aftermath of both hurricane Helene and Milton.
Captain Matthew Prebish, a Southwest pilot who already has a family of pets, ABC7 shares, including Smalls, a cat, Tahoe, a Lab, and Wrigley, a golden retriever, piloted one of the animal evacuation missions from hurricane-hit areas to Wisconsin.
Prebish told Good Morning America "Once we landed in Milwaukee, [I] started to notice the animals a little bit more. One of them caught my attention and then [I] ended up taking a cat home."
"Avery, she's inquisitive," Prebish added. "I opened the crate up a little bit to kind of let her see if she would really come out. And immediately, her head popped out and she was just looking around and she's just had this personality that she wants to explore the world and just see everything that the world has to offer."
Mirah A. Horowitz, the CEO of Lucky Dog Animal Rescue, an organization that helped coordinate the evacuation flights tells People that, “It was love at 30,000 feet…Avery the kitten is definitely a Lucky Cat and was right at home with his new dad in the cockpit once we landed and parked. Lucky Dog Animal Rescue is extremely proud to have helped make this happy ending possible.”
She also shared details of the rescue operation with People, "Of the 38 animals we evacuated from Florida, 20 will be on this lifesaving flight, as well as an additional 32 dogs and 93 cats who have spent the last three days in our care after being safely evacuated from the mountains of Eastern Tennessee," Horowitz’s statement read. "We are truly grateful to Southwest Airlines for making this flight possible because it gives breathing room to shelters dealing with unprecedented numbers of animals displaced by the storm who need care until they can be reunited with their owners."
From airlines, to pilots, to communities, to shelters around the country, people and organizations across the nation have come together to achieve one goal — getting these animals out of the way of the storm.
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