Now how much of your rationale is conjecture?
Citing 3000 homes in OREGON is fatuous. What kind of resources need to be expended to get 3000 LETTERS to Oregon from Louisiana?
You greatly underestimate the convictions of those who foster abused and abandoned animals.
Several months ago 21 Ibizan Hounds were taken from horrible conditions in NE.
Within weeks, these rare and difficult to place dogs all had either loving foster homes or permanent homes.
Most of the dogs were "problem dogs" due to the mistreatment and neglect they'd suffered.
Not a single foster care provider griped or gave up on them.
The dogs went to every region in the US, all of it paid by those who rescued and fostered/adopted them.
Kipling warned us not to underestimate the power of the dog.
Starving dogs will revert from their temporary "pack behavior" once fed.
The few exceptions to the problem may be the "trained" pit breeds.
Those dogs were doomed for life by their owners right from the start.
There are dozens and dozens of postings on petfinder by people who said the same thing. Then they needed to be rescued by helicopter. They were not allowed to take their pets with them.
If they had not been there in the first place, then the time spent rescuing them could have been spent rescuing someone else - perhaps someone infirm. That's not conjecture, that's fact. The only conjecture is that some people may have died because valuable rescue resources were spent rescuing healthy, able-bodied people who stayed behind BECAUSE of their pets. But it is not conjecture that some people died when they stayed behind due to their pets.
**(In my opinion, they should have taken their pets with them and slept in their cars if necessary, since they expected it would be 2 days at the most. But that's a separate topic altogether.)
No it's not. The point is there is enough money, enough resources, enough homes, enough love to go around.
And part of my point was that if the pets had been allowed to be evacuated in the first place with the humans (and if hotels and shelters had allowed pets), then the HUMAN rescue effort NOW wouldn't be nearly as great, and the human losses wouldn't be as great. People chose not to evacuate because they loved their pets so much that they wouldn't leave them. As a result, the HUMAN rescue job was bigger than it needed to be, which cost more money than it needed to cost, and more people died than needed to die.
You think it doesn't take money to clean up all the dead animals that will be left in another week or two? If they could have been evacuated in the first place, we wouldn't have all the "dangers" and expenses we are going to have due to "packs of wild dogs" and "feral cats" and "rabies" (overblown myth) and rotting animals, etc.