Saving The Pets

When Hurricane Kartrina hit here in August of 2005, most of the city had been evacuated prior to the storm coming into the city. About 95% of the residents left before hand, preventing a death toll of many more thousands. But besides those people who either had no where to go, didn't want to leave or had no way to exit, guess who got left behind? It was the family pet, mostly cats and dogs. Many hotels will not accept pets. So thousands of cats, dogs, birds and other family pets were abandoned to die or starve in locked houses where they wee trapped.
But this weekend there is a solution to the dilemma of what to do with Fido if where one evacuates won't accept him. It's the micro chip. Pet owners took their dogs and cats to be injected between the shoulder blades with a microchip bearing a 'National Home Again' pet ID number, so that when Fido and friends are evacuated this year (a state program to house evacuated pets has been set up so no more animals will die during a hurricane evacuation incident) they can be scanned at the animal shelter that boards them to show just who and where the owner of the ID pet has evacuated. The owners are notified and can pick up their pets whenever they leave the spot to which they have evacuated during the storm.
Ironically, the humans aren't faring as well here. My local newspaper reported today that cemetery personnel is so scarce now that some families have to literally bury their own dead when completing the funeral at the cemetery. That's right! The city's cemetery burial crews are down to "skeleton crews' with no workers available to bury the casket that is brought to the cemetery for funeral services.
The city administrator in charge of the cemeteries a was quoted as saying, "We no longer dig graves or put caskets into graves." So funeral homes were told that families must supply grave digging personnel. Most people contract with the funeral homes to find someone to dig their graves, but there have been several instances where family or friends of the deceased have gotten down and dirty and physically buried the deceased themselves because no one was found to do it. Since there is no law that forces the city to dig the graves nothing can be done to force them to do so.
And with so few people living in New Orleans now there is little prospect of hiring grave diggers, who make less money than many fast food workers here. Most city cemeteries were so badly flooded by the hurricane that they are in ruins anyway. It's all another of the Kafkaesque scene here in New Orleans.
It's so bad now that eventually the city might need grave diggers to bury itself. Oh, well....at least we will know where are pets are.