“We’re going to find this poor little guy a home,” says Terri DiBona, intake coordinator for Arizona Basset Hound Rescue, the group that helped bring the dog to the Valley. The group usually focuses on helping Basset Hounds and Basset mixes pulled from county shelters around Arizona, providing foster homes and arranging adoptions for the dogs. But when the Phoenix-based group was asked to shelter a Hound who had spent the last five months at a Mississippi shelter for pets left homeless by Hurricane Katrina, it pulled off a cross-country rescue.

Here’s how it happened:

  More than 4,000 animals displaced by Katrina have come through the shelter at Tylertown, Miss., since the storm roared ashore last Aug. 29. Volunteers at the facility operated by Utah-based Best Friends Animal Society have fed and housed the dogs, cats, birds and rabbits rounded up from the streets of New Orleans. They’ve reunited some of the animals with their owners, and put others up for adoption. Its mission accomplished, the Tylertown shelter is scheduled to close Feb. 28.
By the first week of February, less than 100 animals remained there. One of them was a thin Basset whose owners had never been found. Five months after the storm he was still there at the shelter, looking sad even by Basset Hound standards.

The three-year-old Basset Hound rode out the storm’s terrifying 135 mph winds and the ensuing flood somewhere in New Orleans. He was picked up eight days after the storm from Interstate 10 in Jefferson Parish, on the city’s west side. His owners had been forced to leave him there on the highway when rescuers arrived to take them from the storm-ravaged city, says Barbara Williamson, media coordinator of Best Friends. “It was one of those cases where the people were told they could go to safety but they could not take their dog.”

The abandoned Basset Hound’s photo ran on several web sites set up to reunite pets with their owners in the storm’s wake, Williamson says. But no one ever came looking for him. His life in New Orleans vanished forever. Breed rescue groups in states nearer the storm-ravaged Gulf Coast had taken all the homeless Hounds they could handle, DiBona said, so a staffer at the Tylertown facility e-mailed AZBHR to see if they could take the dog. DiBona took one look at the dog’s photo and said they would help him. “You could tell he was traumatized,” she says. “Just because we’re in Arizona doesn’t mean we can’t help.”

But it did mean that getting the dog here would take some engineering. DiBona and volunteers from other rescue groups across the country patched together a series of rides that would get the dog from Mississippi to Phoenix, a journey of nearly 1,600 miles.

A woman who had been working at the Best Friends shelter drove the Basset from Tylertown, Miss., to Arlington, Texas. From there a volunteer with Texas-based From the Heart Animal Rescue drove him to El Paso, where yet another kind-hearted human picked him up and drove him to San Simon, Ariz. Then AZBHR members Bev and Dave Burkholder picked him up and took him to Tucson.

Whew! The trip wasn’t over yet, though. Robin Martin of AZBHR got her mother to bring the dog up to Phoenix. He’s in a foster home right now in Central Phoenix, where his caretakers have named him Hurricane.
Hurricane is in need of many good meals and lots of love, says his foster mom, Leanne Potts. “His trust in humans has been shattered,” she says.

He’s doing better, though. Potts says Hurricane has started wagging his tail again, and he has taken a liking to her four-year-old daughter, Lucinda, who wraps him in baby doll blankets and reads to him each night.
AZBHR is determined to make a happy ending for Hurricane, the storm-tossed Basset. “We may not be able to help all the animals left homeless by Katrina, but we can help this one guy,” DiBona says.

Meet "Hurricane"! We named him that because he is a dog rescued from the New Orleans area after Hurricane Katrina. He is very sweet, but extremely skittish. He opened up a little for a short time, but then went back to being timid. He is going to need some time to settle down. Leanne Potts, a free lance journalist foster Basset-Mom, adopted Hurricane and what a great home he found. Leanne already has a daughter and 2 other Bassets. Not all of the stories end up as happy Endings like Hurricane.

Thank You Leanne.