Nita Hemeter remembers the barking and meowing, and being able to look up from the middle of a New Orleans darkened by power outages to see "every star in the sky."
It was early September 2005, a little more than a week after Hurricane Katrina had torn across the Gulf Coast — and Hemeter, who'd snuck past a roadblock to rescue her own dog and cat, decided to stay.
"I knew there were animals all over that needed help because you could hear them hollering," she said. "It was just awful."
Estimates range widely, but it's believed that tens of thousands of pets — if not hundreds of thousands — were left behind during Katrina. Rescue workers in helicopters, boats and buses often didn't allow people to bring their animals. Many evacuation shelters wouldn't allow people to bring them in. Residents like Hemeter's son, who left his mother's dog and cat at home with food and water, mistakenly believed they'd be able to return in just a few days.
"The messaging back then was: Just evacuate, leave your pets behind," said Randy Covey, an animal rescue manager, who spent weeks in New Orleans post-Katrina. "There was no accommodation made for pets in the evacuation."
The images and stories of animal suffering, and of people forced to make the heart-wrenching decision of leaving a pet or service animal behind, shocked the nation. And in 2006, just over a year after the storm, federal lawmakers passed a law — the Pet Evacuation & Transportation Safety (PETS) Act — incentivizing states and agencies to include pets in their disaster planning.
"If there is a silver lining in Hurricane Katrina — there's so many terrible things that happened — it was that it changed how the country, to this day, considers the role of animals in our communities," said Ana Zorrilla, chief executive officer of the Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
"To make sure that people are safe," Zorrilla said, "we have to take care of animals too."
Saving pets saves humans
One of the key takeaways for emergency responders in the wake of Hurricane Katrina was that efforts to save pets also save humans.
It's estimated that between 150,000 and 200,000 people didn't evacuate ahead of or during the storm. A poll conducted by the Fritz Institute in the months after Katrina found that nearly half of the people surveyed who didn't evacuate actually stayed because of a pet.
"We heard a lot of stories about helicopter rescues from rooftops where there's floodwaters all around the house and the people are on the roof with their pets and the helicopters would come to rescue them and say, 'No, you can't bring your pets,' and the people would just stay," Covey said.
Nearly 1,400 people died in Katrina, making it one of the deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history. And while it's unclear how many people died because they refused to leave an animal, there's little doubt it played a role.
"It became evident during Hurricane Katrina, when asked to choose between abandoning their pets or their own personal safety, many pet owners chose to risk their lives and remain with their pets, and some of them perished," former Connecticut Congressman Christopher Shays said before the vote for the 2006 PETS Act. "This is a public safety issue."
When disaster strikes, take your pet
The animal welfare crisis that took place in the days and weeks following Katrina was unprecedented in scale.
A team of animal rescue organizations opened up an animal shelter at the Lamar-Dixon Expo Center, an equestrian center about 60 miles west of New Orleans. It was the largest animal rescue and shelter operation in U.S. history.
But even this massive operation couldn't handle the number of animals that needed shelter. A few weeks after the storm, rescue efforts shifted from trying to capture and evacuate pets to feeding and watering them in place, said Covey.
"There weren't enough people to provide care, there wasn't enough space, so the animals would just be going from one bad situation to another," he said.
The takeaway for Covey, who still works in animal rescue in the greater Portland, Ore., area, was that no matter how much local or federal officials plan, they're not going to be equipped to handle all of the animal needs if people don't bring their pets with them in a disaster.
In his county alone, Covey said, there are an estimated 175,000 dogs and 115,000 cats. He has a full-time staff of about 20 people.
"There is no way we could accommodate hundreds of thousands of pets," he said. "So the messaging has changed: If you evacuate, take your pets with you."
Cesar Perea, associate vice president of rescue at the American Humane Society, said his organization has seen a "monumental shift" in the way that emergency responders handle pets and pet owners in disasters post-Katrina, but there's still room to grow.
During the Los Angeles wildfires in early 2025, for example, Perea said there was a period when the affected areas were locked down after all of the people had been evacuated, which temporarily hampered rescue efforts for the pets that had been left behind in the fast-moving blazes.
After humans have been evacuated from a disaster area, Perea said, "The next logical phase should be: Let's get these animals out of here and decide how to do that."
More broadly though, Perea said people need to be prepared to take care of themselves and their pet companions during a natural disaster, by making sure they have enough emergency food and water for both.
"I always tell my friends and family when they ask me how to prepare themselves, the first thing I say is no one's coming and you need to be prepared for that," he said. "It's a bit of a doomsday comment and a horrible thing to think about, but it's the reality of the world we live in."
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