I do not believe the Snowball story was fake. I'm sorry apackof2, that after several months you now believe that to be the case.
So many dogs were forcefully taken from owners. In this case I'm specifically talking about those trying to board busses and get out of New Orleans. But some even had their dogs shot in their homes to force them to leave.
But back to Snowball. Because of all the animals forcefully removed while people boarded busses, and because early on they didn't allow the animal rescue groups in right away to take the animals to a temp shelter, the animals were taken and just let loose in many instances. There was also talk of a stairwell where many dogs were placed together, all loose, to fight it out amongst themeselves with no food or water.
There are a 'few' Snowballs, sadly. Yes, _the_ Snowball cruelly taken from the little boy. But there was another dog shown in some video footage that may have been the companion of an elderly woman. [She said, "There goes my companion of 9 years."]
What has been unclear is whether the footage of the dog standing up on it's hind legs looking at the bus doors is actually Snowball or one of the other dogs forcefully taken from his/her owner.
There's quite a bit of information here:
http://www.katrinafoundpets.com/app.htm
There are various speculations about what may have happened to Snowball. They have pictures from in the Superdome pre-landfall of a little boy with a little white dog and they have the story of a different little boy who has a new little white dog in TX after that dog ran into the mom's skirt at the bus loading site. It's possible Snowball was taken to the "stairwell" . It's also possible that someone picked him up, took him home and never heard about Snowball. It's also possible he was simply turned loose, is in a pack of strays or deceased.
I had a long conversation with the woman who runs that website. There is just no evidence that the Snowball story was real, and AP was exceptionally uncooperative when she tried to get more information about it, so she could try to find the boy and use the reward money to help find the dog and reunite them. Also note that while practically every other news outlet on the planet continued to follow that story until the next hurricane hit, AP went oddly silent on it immediately after it first ran the story. If AP's reporter actually saw what she wrote that she saw, she'd have been able to provide at least some basic additional info (like what color the boy was) that would have helped the search for him and his family.
And according to the AP story, the boy and his family were on one of the buses which went to the big shelters in Houston and San Antonio. Evacuees in those shelters had non-stop access to mass media, mostly tuned to hurricane-related news coverage. Nearly all of these people would have seen the story and heard about the growing reward fund. But not ONE person came forward to either claim that they were part of the family in question, or to claim that they had witnessed the incident (and thus might have been able to help identify the family and collect some of the reward). These buses were holding 50-70 people per bus, and were being loaded at a staging area where many hundreds of people were lined up waiting to get on buses. It is not plausible that the events as described in the AP story happened without dozens of witnesses who would have recognized the incident in subsequent media coverage, and it's not plausible that not a single one of those dozens of people wouldn't have come forward (remember, they were almost all poor to begin with, had lost everything, and there was a sizeable reward being offered).