NEW ORLEANS -- When wise men go to figure out what happened here after hurricane Katrina, when hard on the heels of great natural disaster came a sudden and shocking breach in the civil order, they may want to talk to Dan Maloney.
Mr. Maloney, vice-president and general curator of the Audubon Zoo located in a sprawling and lush city park, was explaining yesterday why, as the enormous storm first approached, staff decided to leave the pink flamingos to their own devices.
"We figured," he said with the biologist's sure logic, "that it was less risky to leave them out to hunker down on their own, and find their own safe places, rather than shove them into a small box somewhere."
And that, of course, is a pretty good description of just what happened to as many as 45,000 of the human beings who lived here, most of them African-Americans and most of them poor and not terribly lucky in the first instance.
Running for their lives from homes that were washed away when the levees broke and water began rising up from the drains, they were directed to or deposited at two major public buildings, the Superdome and Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, both on higher ground in the centre of the city.
There, cheek to jowl -- squawking infants and sick old folks crammed together in a darkened sports stadium and a cavernous centre meant to hold huge crowds for only a handful of hours -- they lived for five interminable days and nights.
Stripped even of privacy and dignity, surrounded by human waste as toilets overflowed, without food and water much of the time, their pleas for help often met by blank stares from the few in authority they saw, most nonetheless suffered in silence with that terrible weary acceptance that is near bred in the bone in black Americans raised in the South.
But a very few of their number -- criminals and drug addicts in the main -- slipped into the vacuum left by law enforcement, and in the result, what followed was unimaginable violence.
The dome and the convention centre were the equivalent of Mr. Maloney's "small box." As James Pellet, a 57-year-old African-American who refused to go to either place and who in fact refuses still to leave his beloved city, put it the other day while picking through the trash along Convention Center Boulevard, "I saw a scientific experiment once, where they clambered up a bunch of rats together, and they went crazy and attacked each other. This looked very similar to me."
Mr. Maloney had much better success at the zoo.
The morning after the hurricane-cum-flood, only one adult bird was a little the worse for wear (and after intravenous fluids, has rejoined the flock), while all five of the newborn chicks soon came peeking out from behind their parents' skirts, much to the delight of their keepers.
Ditto the baby egrets, with their ridiculous snowy punk cuts. Ditto the West African crown chicks. Ditto the five giraffes, led by Murphy, the male Mr. Maloney calls "the perfect giraffe" because while he wasn't hand-raised (and thus isn't overly familiar with people and prone to aggression), he is comfortable with human beings while retaining "enough of his giraffiness."
In fact, though the zoo wasn't spared by the storm and is surrounded by neighbourhoods that remain drowned, the big trees that were smashed seemed to fall the right way. Almost no animals were lost or injured, only a couple of river otters died and an alligator is missing, which Mr. Maloney suspects has merely temporarily relocated.
Mr. Maloney and his staff -- about a dozen of them have been here for 10 days, and are sleeping in the zoo's Reptile House -- have given some thought, in recent days, to the differences between those of their own species and those for which they care. Their news of the city outside their implausibly restful haven is spotty and sporadic, but they have nonetheless heard enough to render them stricken and sickened.
"I've always been glad I worked with animals rather than people," Eva Jacobson, who normally works in the bird department but is now in charge of making the diets for all the critters, said yesterday. She is not particularly sentimental about those in her charge. "If animals get desperate, they can get as ugly as people," she reminded her listener. "The difference is, we imagine people can be above that."
The day after Katrina, she said, she could see a sort of stunned numbness in some of the eyes greeting her, "but it wasn't as if they panicked and ran or anything." It has taken some days before the animals began greeting their keepers with signs of recognition; they are never overtly enthusiastic, she said, unlike companion animals.
Ms. Jacobson doesn't have a car, but had several offers of a ride out before the hurricane, but, as with so many others with pets, she couldn't bring herself to leave behind her three parrots and two cats. "We have the option," she said, "of going if we feel like going. We can leave. Animals have no choice."
As Mr. Maloney put it, "We stay, because animals can't leave."
He is married to Laura, the executive director of the local SPCA, making them perhaps the only couple in the United States where one spouse is in charge of a city's exotic animals and the other of its pets. They met when both were working at the Philadelphia Zoo.
Mrs. Maloney is leading an enormous rescue effort here, heading the lead agency of the half-dozen whose volunteer members are now saving abandoned animals from decimated neighbourhoods.
Yesterday, they were concentrating on Memorial Medical Mercy Baptist Hospital, known locally as Baptist.
Located in one of the city's most densely populated areas, the hospital functioned as a local refuge centre, and many of those who fled to it brought their pets with them. They were not turned away, but the animals were sent to a floor of the hospital. Sunday, the remaining patients were removed -- everyone knows that people are saved first -- but yesterday, it was the pets' turn.
After that, the rescue crews -- they have their own uniforms, boats and vehicles, just as the police and military do -- will be combing city streets, as best they can, checking out addresses they've been given by worried pet owners, and listening for the sound of crying animals.
The rescued animals are triaged and bathed, and then taken to a shelter north of New Orleans. The animals are identified by the street or address where they were found.
Indeed, all over New Orleans, I encountered people who stayed behind, and rode out Katrina, because they wouldn't leave without their dogs. There are also lost animals darting here and there, adopting the first person they see, as a little bedraggled terrier was there when a senior named Caroline (she's already the victim of identity-theft and doesn't give out her last name any more) opened her front door after the flood.
If this all sounds like foolishness, this effort to save pets where people have died and lost so much, it isn't, I don't think. Caring for the vulnerable -- and animals are in their way as vulnerable as the very old and the very young -- is one of the distinguishing and most noble of human characteristics.
Besides, as Mr. Maloney said yesterday, "There's no question that the wild world can be brutal and unforgiving at times, but there's no malice in animals. Oh, they can hold grudges, and they get their feelings hurt, but there's nothing nefarious about them."
No malice; no meanness, and the ability to bring out what's good in their keepers: No wonder the zoo feels so peaceful. It's a place where people are gentle with one another and their charges, where humans sleep with snakes, and may be safer than with their own kind.