By Rebecca Goldfine,Staff Writer

FRYEBURG – Distressed by images of abandoned animals roaming New Orleans’ desolate, toxic streets, Monique Kramer gathered a small crew of volunteers and thousands of dollars’ worth of medical supplies to travel south and save as many animals as she could.

Kramer, a veterinarian in Fryeburg, said in an interview Wednesday she became fretful watching news coverage of Hurricane Katrina. “I saw the government taking out boats and going past all the animals. It seemed so criminal. I didn’t sleep for a week, I was so stressed out about it.”

Many people who evacuated their homes before the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29 left their pets behind because they assumed they would return home soon. And those who left after the region became swamped found that many rescuers would not take animals. There were others, too, who did not seem to care whether their animals survived, Kramer said.

“Humans are responsible for domestic animals. They’re like infants,” she said. “We’re crappy stewards. Animals are sentient beings, and they’re dependent on humans. And humans fail them left and right.”

On Sept. 17, Kramer drove nonstop to Louisiana with four other volunteers from Maine. She stayed for 12 days, healing sick animals and rescuing ones abandoned after most people had fled the coastal area. She used donations from people in the Fryeburg-Conway, N.H., region to buy discounted medical supplies from companies, she said.

“The animals were everywhere, all over the streets,” Kramer said. Dead and alive. Some corpses were attached to leashes still, or locked in cages. Skeletal cats slunk through the streets. Animals had chemical burns from the contaminated water. And many dogs had instinctively formed roving packs, Kramer said.

The crew brought back to Maine 22 dogs that Kramer planned to rehabilitate and place in new homes. Some have already been adopted, but five of the dogs at Harvest Hills Animal Shelter in Fryeburg still need homes. A few that Kramer nursed at her home have been placed with foster owners, she said.

Joan McBurnie, director of Harvest Hills, said the dogs were skittish at first, and many were sick with heartworm, a mosquito-borne parasite. “They wanted a lot of attention and wanted to be touched,” she said.

Potential adopters have shown a lot of interest in the animals because they like the thought of having a pet that comes with a story, McBurnie said.

One of the people who traveled with Kramer was Dick McGoldrick, an animal control officer in western Maine. McGoldrick, 77, took the trip to help at an emergency shelter called Camp Katrina in Tylertown, Miss.

The shelter, or staging area as McGoldrick called it, was set up by Louisiana’s humane society to treat found animals and send them to shelters or homes around the country. McGoldrick tended animals and stood guard at night to protect the animals and medications from thieves, he said. Many of the dogs were valuable fighting dogs, which some people were hoping to grab from makeshift shelters, he said.

Kramer, 37, who grew up in the Queens section of New York City, has been a veterinarian for more than two years, a wildlife biologist for four years, and an animal rescuer for 21 years. She treated animals at the staging area for dehydration, vomiting and diarrhea, she said. Some dogs had pneumonia from swimming so much.

The suffering, the chaos and the atmosphere of annihilation traumatized both people and animals. McGoldrick said, “Can you imagine a dog that didn’t know what the hell had just happened? His owners are nowhere to be found. And there is water all around that he’s never seen before. And there’s no food.”

During rescue missions into an eerily empty city, Kramer said she found dogs that had been locked inside houses for nearly a month. One pit bull with a mournful face currently living at the Fryeburg shelter was plucked from a rooftop. Kramer had many stories to tell, including saving fish and finding a dog paralyzed with fright that, with nurturing, regained movement. Many animals ran from her; some tried to bite her. But animals also sought her out.

“When I was in the 9th Ward, calling for dogs, a cat came running up to me.” The animal looked like it was trying to say, “God, get me out of here,” Kramer recalled.

She said she has a plane ticket to return south this weekend or the second weekend in November. “There is still so much to do,” she said. “It is going to be months. There are thousands displaced. They’ve only got a fraction of them.”