Animals from Gulf Coast arrive in Iowa

A shipment of pets arrived in Iowa last night. Animals lost or abandoned during last month’s Gulf Coast storms are being taken i by shelters all over the country according to Tom Colvin with the Animal Rescue League of Central Iowa. He says like homes and businesses, animal shelters in New Orleans and other hurricane-hit towns were damaged or destroyed. Relief shelters were set up to take in pets found roaming the streets, or ones left behind by people who couldn’t take them when they fled the area. Now those temporary shelters must close so they’ve asked shelters all across the country to help take their animals. Colvin says many of the animals come from a shelter in Gonzales, Louisiana. Colvin says there was a peak population of some 2,000 animals at that shelter, and in all during this time 6,000 have passed through. “It’s a lot of lost dogs,” he says, adding many cats and other animals also went through that temporary shelter, just outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The shelters did try to find the owners of as many animals as they could that were lost or left behind. Colvin says there were an “awful lot of reclaims,” hundreds of pets reunited with their owners down in Louisiana. Now they’re dealing with the rest, animals not yet returned to their people, or those that may have been homeless to start with. Shelters from all over the state sent representatives to Des Moines and Cedar Rapids where two trucks arrived Friday night carrying the animals from Gulf Coast communities. While these animals are unclaimed, now they’ve arrived in Iowa they won’t be sent to new homes right away. They’ve been asked to hold them just one more week, and post them on a national registry, to give a last chance to the people looking for them. So in one week, on October 16, they’ll become properties of the shelters that have taken them in, and will be available for adoption. For more information, or to donate to the Animal Rescue League, surf to www.arl-iowa. (get the link at our website: http://www.arl-iowa.org/ )