Dogs

Dogs in the hospital during the disaster were not incidental background: their presence exposed the collision between attachment, evacuation rules, and scarce care. The account follows two pampered golden retrievers, Ewing Cook’s daughter’s Newfoundland Rolfie, and a poodle at LifeCare Hospitals. Their circumstances differ, but each makes the prohibition on rescuing animals concrete: dogs were loved, hidden, tended, and, in several cases, euthanized when their people feared they would be left behind to suffer.

Hidden Pets and Disrupted Shelter

An evacuation alarm announced that boats were waiting, that people should go downstairs, and that they could bring only one bag; it also warned that no animals were allowed. In the respiratory care department, staff and families reacted to the prospect of leaving pets behind. Among the animals were two golden retrievers whose owners had concealed them in the hospital, where pets were not permitted. At home, the dogs slept in their own room on separate recliner beds and were not allowed outside without boots on all four paws. Their carefully managed domestic life stood in sharp contrast to the crowded, improvised shelter in which they were now dependent on people who could not take them along.

The first alarm did not provide a dependable route to safety. Employees and relatives descended by flashlight, only to meet Susan Mulderick, who said there were no boats. The confusion did not change the practical constraint conveyed by the announcement: rescue craft would not carry animals. The dogs’ fate therefore became entangled with a human evacuation that was itself uncertain, rather than with any shortage of affection for them.

Rolfie in the Heat

Rolfie, the large Newfoundland belonging to Cook’s adult daughter, first played in the floodwater. As the heat intensified, he began panting heavily. His daughter, intensive care nurse Stephanie Meibaum, tried to get oxygen for him from the wall supply in an empty surgical building across a pedestrian bridge from the main hospital. Rolfie lumbered inside on shaking legs, then collapsed and convulsed. The movement from floodwater to the overheated hospital and the attempted oxygen treatment traces a worsening physical crisis, not simply an evacuation problem.

Cook sought medicine through the hospital pharmacy. He wrote a prescription for Rolfe Meibaum for five 100-milligram tablets of phenobarbital, an antiseizure drug, and on the same form ordered eight half-gram syringes of Pentothal, a powerful anesthetic. In Louisiana, animal prescriptions ordinarily came from licensed veterinarians; amid the disaster, the pharmacist allowed Cook’s request but required written documentation before releasing the controlled drugs. The prescription made an exceptional act legible in the form of a hospital order, while the emergency circumstances blurred the boundary between human and veterinary care.

Cook injected Rolfie with Pentothal, administering multiple doses before the dog died. The account records the death without presenting it as an easy or abstract decision: Rolfie’s collapse, convulsions, and repeated injections are the specific circumstances of the episode. Afterward, Cook’s wife and daughter wept. When Horace Baltz asked what had happened, Cook described it with a bluster that concealed sadness from Baltz’s view, ending in what Baltz perceived as a devilish laugh. The family’s grief and Cook’s manner remain in tension; the narrative does not reduce the scene to either clinical procedure or simple emotional release.

Rescue Rules and the Golden Retrievers

The exclusion of animals from boats and helicopters left owners fearing that their pets would not be rescued. The owners of the two golden retrievers eventually departed by boat, leaving the dogs in Cook’s office and instructing him not to abandon them to suffer alone. Their departure turned a previously concealed arrangement into a direct transfer of responsibility. Cook euthanized the retrievers as well. Together with Rolfie, they make three dogs whose deaths the account connects to the disaster and to the prospect of being left without rescue.

The retrievers’ story reverses the familiar promise of evacuation as straightforward deliverance. A boat could carry their owners away, but not the animals who had been hidden in the hospital and cared for as members of a household. The instruction to Cook gave their owners’ attachment a final practical form, while leaving him to act on it in their absence. The narrative supplies the order and the outcome, but does not claim to know the dogs’ experience or to resolve the moral weight of the choice.

Dogs Among Patients and Caregivers

A poodle at LifeCare adds another view of the same pressure. The dog belonged to a nurse and barked from a nearby room while patients and staff endured the heat and uncertainty. Wilda McManus, whose daughter Angela was caring for her, told Angela to quiet the animal. A cat escaped from a shower stall, and the nurse’s dog pinned it behind a cage; meanwhile, the nurse, anxious that her own dog might be left behind to be euthanized, spent more time feeding and doting on it than caring for Wilda, as Angela perceived it. The account thus shows affection for an animal alongside a consequential diversion of attention from a patient who needed care.

Angela’s own response sharpened that contrast. Exhausted and anxious about family near the levees, she fed Wilda through her tube, changed her colostomy bag, and eventually found help to clean and redress her mother when running water was unavailable. The dog’s place in this scene is not merely sentimental: concern for its fate competes with the immediate work of tending a vulnerable patient. Across the hidden retrievers, Rolfie, and the poodle, dogs register the disaster at household scale. They depend on human decisions, but the evacuation system offers them no place of their own, leaving their survival bound to the choices and capacities of the people around them.