“We’re walking through three feet of human waste and smelling death everywhere; it’s not glamorous,” described Allan Schwartz, vice president of Days End Farm Horse Rescue (DEFHR) from Lisbon, Md., on Sept. 29 while working to help animals and their owners in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

A Sept. 28th rescue trip was to Lake Charles, La., about 20 miles from the Texas border.

“What we saw, it’s pretty bad,” said the veteran of nine disaster recovery efforts. “We were told Cameron is pretty much destroyed…no buildings left. Lot of places are still flooded. There’s black, brackish, foul-smelling water. Our crew was repulsed a bit because they put boat in water, and the boat was ‘crawling.’ There was so much bacteria they felt like the water was alive.”

Yesterday’s recoveries were not typical, even with the experience of these members. They went to Lake Charles to remove some small exotic animals from a registered wildlife rehabilitation center. Schwartz said one of their team members is a wildlife rehabilitator himself and knows a network of people that helped them find homes for these animals until the Cameron facility can be rebuilt