A kitten is the delight of a household. All day long a comedy is played out by an incomparable actor.
~Jules Champfleury
Shortly after dawn on an otherwise ordinary morning in late June of 2016, heavy raindrops began to fall across much of West Virginia. Within moments, torrential rain began in what was later called a catastrophic “thousand-year” flood, sweeping away cars, houses, and bridges in a mighty deluge of raging water and mud. In the path of the destruction were hundreds of thousands of animals, among them three newborn kittens.
Nearly a thousand miles away, Janet Swanson’s phone rang. A lifelong ardent animal lover and philanthropist, Swanson has been volunteering with the American Humane Rescue team since the devastating EF-5 tornado almost wiped Moore, Oklahoma off the map back in 2013. After she was told of the newest humanitarian disaster, Swanson began laying out plans to mobilize with the famed rescue program, which began its work more than 100 years ago rescuing wounded war horses in World War I Europe. It has been a part of the rescue effort in virtually every major disaster since, including the Great Ohio River Flood of 1937, Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy.
Deploying to a disaster zone is hardly glamorous. The work is vitally essential and in the end gratifying, but it is also exhausting, dirty, and hazardous. Volunteers live in one of five giant American Humane Rescue vehicles, sleeping in bunks after arduous eighteen-hour days coaxing frightened, starving, and often ill animals out of trees and wreckage, surrounded by stagnant water, sharp rubble, and downed power lines.
Janet was trained and prepared to deal with all these conditions, but was still shocked when she saw the magnitude of the destruction created by raging waters that in some places crested at twenty-six feet over flood levels.
“It was terrible,” she said. “There was mud everywhere. The people who came to us for help had heartbreaking stories about losing their homes. They brought in their pets who needed attention after having been in floodwaters. In some cases, they had lost one of their pets to the flood and brought in a surviving cat or dog. All the people who came were so glad we were there. They were truly grateful to be able to get the necessary care for their companion animals.”
Swanson was one of a corps of ten highly trained volunteers and animal doctors who deployed to rescue and make sure veterinary care, food, and plenty of love made their way to the lost and abandoned animals whose owners’ homes were destroyed. Using one of the fifty-foot American Humane Rescue trucks as a base of operations, the team set out to find animals missing in the flood zone and set up a mobile veterinary clinic to provide first aid, wellness checks, vaccines, and food for sick and hungry pets, treating more than 100 animals in one day alone. The rest of the team scoured the area for lost and injured animals.
That’s when a volunteer found a trio of tiny kittens huddled together on the lid of a trashcan in the middle of a creek bed. Tragically, their mother was gone. When the small litter of animal orphans arrived at the safety of the mobile clinic, the kittens were trembling, covered in fleas and ticks, and swollen from painful parasitic infections. They were hungry and dangerously dehydrated.
After giving them emergency veterinary aid, the team provided the feeble kittens with around-the-clock care, even sleeping with them and waking up every three hours to bottle-feed them, slowly nursing them back to health. Because of this tireless dedication, all three kittens made full recoveries. The tiny creatures stole the hearts of all the American Humane responders, and they were passed around with big smiles during the daily briefings and debriefings.
But a serious problem arose. The kittens were still extremely young and the surrounding area had been destroyed, which meant there was no local foster care network left to take care of them. The rescuers discussed the situation. One of the trio, a tortoise-shell cat with warm, grateful eyes, had touched Swanson’s heart. Naming her “Hava” (a variant of the Hebrew word for “Love”), she agreed to take her home and adopt her.
“I had never adopted a baby that young,” said Swanson. “Almost every companion animal I have ever had was an older rescue coming either directly off the streets or from a shelter. These kittens would only be two weeks old on the day we left and need frequent bottle feedings as their mother had been lost in the flood. When I heard that there was nobody to take care of them, I agreed to take one and got a crash course in bottle-feeding, with a full sheet of instructions on just what to do and how to do it.”
American Humane Rescue veterinarian Dr. Lesa Staubus ended up taking the two other brothers with her, so all three found good homes in which they could finally relax after their ordeal.
Since the rescue, Hava has been doing great. She is now part of a loving family that includes four cats, two dogs, three parrots, and a bunny — the perfect environment for a lively and curious cat.
When they were rescued, Hava was the first to do everything and was always the most adventurous of the three kittens. She would explore everything first, before her brothers, to the point where the rescue team would laugh and dubbed her the “nosey” one, always wanting to check everything out.
Janet said she continued to be that way once at her house. She says, “She is now a happy, healthy girl who will soon be a year old. She still comes to me every day, just to be held and cuddled the way she did when she was a little one. Stories like hers are why we do what we do at American Humane, and for her part, Hava has lived up to her name, returning love to me every day.”
~Dr. Robin Ganzert
