Pooch lost in Katrina going home

Kim Zappulla was putting up her Christmas tree in her Los Angeles home Tuesday when she got the call.

Deborah Loustalot, a Louisiana woman displaced after Hurricane Katrina, wanted to talk about a dog in a California shelter she thought might be Gigi, the chow mix she had to leave behind in St. Bernard Parish. Zappulla had been trying to find Loustalot’s dog for more than a month, but she knew in her gut the dog in California wasn’t Gigi.

So she told Loustalot to sit down at her computer, and they would look for Gigi together over the phone one more time. Within six minutes on www.petfinder.com, she heard the cheering of Loustalot, her husband, youngest son and sister-in-law on the other end.

“It’s Gigi! It’s Gigi!” they yelled, looking at a picture of a dog in foster care now in Spokane.

Zappulla, an animal lover who volunteers her time to connect hurricane victims with their pets, tried to bring them back to earth. The listing said the dog was found in Violet, not St. Bernard Parish, she warned the family.

“Where do you think we’re from?” Loustalot asked Zappulla. Violet is a district within the parish.

Excited, Zappulla quickly typed the family’s former address and the address where the dog was found into MapQuest, a Web site that calculates driving directions. The distance between the two spots was less than half a mile. And the dog in the listing wore a brown leather collar, just like Gigi.

“My Christmas tree still isn’t up,” Zappulla said.

On Monday, Gigi is expected to fly – courtesy of Delta Airlines – from Spokane to Alabama, where the Loustalots are living until their Louisiana home is repaired. She’s one of eight Katrina dogs that Zappulla and her friend Janet Taylor have reunited with their families.

Gigi’s journey home hasn’t been a direct route. After being picked up in St. Bernard Parish, she was taken to Oregon and looked after by a humane society there. That organization sent her to the humane society in Bellevue, Wash., with about 40 other dogs, and then SpokAnimal C.A.R.E. took four of the dogs – including Gigi – to lighten that agency’s burden.

When northeast Spokane resident Janet Biegler heard on the news that canine hurricane refugees needed foster care, she volunteered. She and her husband have cared for Gigi since Oct. 26.

Wearing her housecoat late Thursday afternoon, she drove Gigi – whom she had been calling Zelda before her original owners were found – back to SpokAnimal for a final checkup before the long flight to the South.

Although Gigi’s mouth seems permanently shaped in a smile, her backside is shaved where a hip dislocated during the hurricane was repaired by Dr. Bob Slack, of Manito Veterinary Hospital, free of charge. He also repaired a broken tooth.

SpokAnimal is caring for seven other dogs displaced by Katrina. Three are in foster care, like Gigi, and the other four are in need of temporary homes.

If the dogs aren’t paired with their original owners by Dec. 15, they will be put up for adoption, Executive Director Gail Mackie said. In California, Katrina dogs will go up for adoption Dec. 11, which worries Zappulla. “Maybe a dog we can’t find the owner for (yet) can have a nice home here. We don’t know,” she said. “But the dog is going to be happier if it’s with its family.”

In the Loustalots’ case, the family is also happier when it’s with its dog. “She is part of our family,” Deborah Loustalot said.

When Katrina hit, the family packed six people into a Ford Taurus to escape. Gigi just didn’t fit.

Leaving her in the house didn’t seem like a big deal, because they thought they’d be back in a day. The storm did more damage than they had expected. When they returned, the inside of their house was waterlogged, and their furniture was upside down.

Loustalot thinks Gigi was injured by tumbling furniture or by the force of the water.

The family hopes to leave Skipperville, Ala., soon and return to Louisiana. They even bought a pickup recently to help with the home repair work, but a driver crashed into them last week.

“It just doesn’t seem like Christmas right now, but with Gigi coming home it does,” Loustalot said. “Everybody will be back together.”

Zappulla won’t be there for Gigi’s reunion, but she knows how the story ends. When she reunited a chubby yellow Labrador named Max with his family recently, the family worried their 11-year-old pooch wouldn’t remember them. As the family yelled “Max! Max!” when they spotted him at the airport, their concern disappeared. “He almost broke the crate to get out,” Zappulla said.