Cats

Cats occupy a small but revealing place in the account of Hurricane Katrina: they are both the subjects of a doctor’s euthanasia and companions someone risks her life to save. At Memorial, John Thiele began euthanizing a pharmacist’s cats as evacuation resumed. Elsewhere, Kathryn Nelson went back through polluted, chest-high water to rescue her cats, then spent a night atop her flooded car with one of them. The contrast is not resolved into a single rule about animals; it shows how care and decisions about death took different forms amid disaster.

Euthanasia at Memorial

As evacuation resumed, Thiele began euthanizing the pharmacist’s cats. The passage does not specify how many cats were involved or describe their condition. It does establish that, by then, Thiele believed pet owners were right to euthanize animals close to death. His view had changed over years of treating critically ill patients in intensive care, where he had seen people in severe pain near the end of life attempt suicide and fail.

When Kathleen Fournier asked Thiele about putting patients out of their misery, the animal euthanasia he was undertaking made it difficult for him not to draw a parallel. The cats thus enter a wider ethical crisis at Memorial, where familiar distinctions between mercy, care, and hastening death were under pressure. The scene records Thiele’s changed convictions and the comparison they prompted, without establishing that the cats’ circumstances were identical to those of the patients.

Cats as companions in the flood

Kathryn Nelson’s cats belong to a different scene of urgent action. After leaving Memorial by boat and reaching dry ground, she walked home through polluted water that rose to her chest, intent on saving them. The house offered nowhere dry to rest; its smell was toxic, and the flood had surrounded her car. She and one of the cats slept on top of it for a night.

The episode gives the cats a concrete place in Nelson’s struggle to survive the disaster: her effort to reach them continued after she had already been forced from her mother’s bedside and evacuated from the hospital. The account does not say what happened to her other cats, so their eventual fates remain unstated.

Contrasting acts of care

The two appearances place cats within distinct, consequential choices. At Memorial, Thiele’s action sits beside his changing belief about euthanasia and his emerging comparison between animals near death and patients suffering in the hospital. In Nelson’s account, saving her cats is the purpose of a perilous return through floodwater, and one animal shares the exposure of the night on the car roof.

Neither scene makes the cats mere background to the human crisis: their vulnerability shapes what people do. Yet the narrative offers no comprehensive account of the animals’ conditions or outcomes. Its contrast is narrower and more telling: in the same disaster, cats could be treated as lives whose deaths might be hastened, or as companions someone would enter dangerous water to save.