The evacuation of New Orleans doomed these animals to a fate of dehydration and starvation. We rescued people, but we left their pets behind to die. Amazingly, we are finding more alive every day, but after three weeks we are hitting the critical hour.

People are frantically calling and telling us their cat is on the third floor of an apartment in New Orleans, or their horses were left in a pasture.

In our day, there are stresses and fractures of the human-animal bond, and some forces at work would sever it once and for all. They pull us in the wrong direction and away from the decent and honorable code that makes us care for creatures who are entirely at our mercy. Especially within the last two hundred years, we've come to apply an industrial mind-set to the use of animals, too often viewing them as if they were nothing but articles of commerce and the raw material of science, agriculture, and wildlife management. Here, as in other pursuits, human ingenuity has a way of outrunning human conscience, and some things we do only because we can--forgetting to ask whether we should.

The animals we are finding now are emaciated and sick and lonely, but we are still finding them alive.

Given the industry's reliance on trucks as the primary means of transporting farm animals, the USDA's failure to apply the Twenty-Eight Hour Law to trucks renders the act virtually useless, ... Transporting farm animals for 28 or more hours without rest, food, or water is clearly inhumane, and the USDA's failure to place any time limit whatsoever on truck transport is indefensible. If the USDA doesn't understand the definition of 'truck,' we would be happy to send over a dictionary.

Puppy mills create misery for dogs and pain for the unwitting purchasers of the animals, and they indirectly deny suitable homes for animals in need. There are millions of healthy, adoptable animals available from shelters and breed rescue organizations.