There’s a dog in this hunt

Kara Keyes bought the black-and-white pit bull as a puppy five years ago, intended as a Valentine’s Day gift for her husband. But the dog -- named Crown for the C-shaped mark on her head -- soon came to adore Keyes.

When Keyes sat on the porch of her New Orleans home, the dog would wriggle between her legs and rest her head on Keyes’ lap.

“If I move, Crown moves,” Keyes said. “If I stop, Crown stops.”

Dogs came and went, but Crown, as Keyes said, was “my first baby.”

Keyes doesn’t spay or neuter her animals. “I don’t want anyone to spay me,” she said by way of explanation. Crown gave birth to a litter of eight in 2004, and Keyes and her husband, Ronald, a forklift operator, presided at their modest Seventh Ward home.

“I know I’m not an M.D., and he’s not either, but we were that day,” said Keyes, who works as a locksmith at the Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans. “She had them in the house. A beautiful litter. . . .”

Three years after Crown came into their lives, Hurricane Katrina hit, and Keyes and her husband were not allowed to return to their home for several weeks. Evacuated to Houston, they got word on Crown from a neighbor who told them he last saw the pit bull sitting on the porch. Waiting.

Meanwhile, Pia Salk, a clinical psychologist from Santa Monica, was one of the legions of volunteers roaming the waterlogged streets of New Orleans rescuing animals stranded by the hurricane. In mid-September of 2005, she spotted a skinny pit bull in front of an evacuated house in the Seventh Ward. There was nothing skittish or ferocious about this canine.

“When I rescued her, she walked past the food and pressed herself against me,” Salk recalled.

The pit bull had cropped ears -- a procedure many veterinarians discourage and some rescuers consider cruel -- and was ill, Salk said. She checked the dog into a makeshift temporary animal shelter at the sprawling Lamar-Dixon Expo Center in Gonzales, some 50 miles west of New Orleans. Salk put her name and phone numbers on the dog’s kennel, asking to be kept apprised of her fate.

Salk continued through the fall to visit New Orleans, but she was back in Santa Monica when she got a call from a volunteer who had taken several rescued dogs out of the Lamar-Dixon shelter and brought them to Albuquerque. The sickly pit bull was among them.

“I said, ‘Why don’t I take her?’ ” Salk recalled.

She nursed the dog through heartworm disease and had her spayed. She moved to an apartment with access to a yard for her canine brood, which included a once-feral Labrador retriever, Luna, also rescued from New Orleans. She named the pit bull Sweetie and took her along in her therapy with at-risk kids.

“I knew I would be fostering the dog,” Salk said. “I figured if someone showed up, they would call me.”

This spring, that call finally came.

A band of volunteers dedicated to reuniting pets with Katrina victims -- even months after the hurricane -- contacted Kara Keyes and Pia Salk to inform them that the rescued Sweetie was the long-lost Crown.

But what could have been a happy ending has become a cross-country custody battle and culture clash over the obligations of dog owners and rescuers. As it turns out, the sensibilities of the Seventh Ward and Santa Monica could not be more at odds.

Salk refused to give up Sweetie.

She won’t acknowledge that Crown and Sweetie are the same dog -- even though Sweetie was rescued in front of the Keyeses’ house. But, she added, “if I did confirm it was the same dog, I would not return the dog to a home I don’t think she’s safe in.”

Salk contends -- based on a telephone conversation with Keyes -- that the New Orleans woman does not know how to treat heartworm. And when Salk wanted to fly to New Orleans to visit the Keyeses before deciding whether to relinquish the dog, Keyes turned her down.

For Keyes and the animal rescue volunteers who helped her, Salk’s claim is outrageous, not to mention patronizing.

“You can’t judge me on my living,” said Keyes in a phone interview from New Orleans. “Crown is mine. She’s my baby.”

Keyes and Salk are not the only ones embroiled in this kind of dispute. The Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, headquartered in New Orleans, estimates that about 100,000 animals were left behind when their owners fled Hurricanes Katrina and Rita two years ago, many of them forbidden to take pets on rescue boats or buses.

Eventually, more than 15,000 pets were rescued. About 8,500 of them made a stop at the Lamar-Dixon shelter. From there, animals were logged in and shipped across the country to various shelters -- which, in turn, allowed them to be fostered at people’s homes. Fewer than 3,000 rescued pets have been reunited with their owners.

Although most New Orleans residents who located their pets got them back or agreed to let the guardians keep them, some met with such resistance that they decided to sue for custody. Lawsuits have been filed against new owners in Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania and Louisiana.

Keyes has retained a Bay Area lawyer. Salk has offered to pay $1,000 for Sweetie, twice what Keyes originally paid. “No,” said Keyes. “The love that I have for Crown could never amount to any money. . . . If I had something of hers and I know it was hers, I would give it back. It’s about what’s right and what’s wrong.”

Her lawyer, John Ingle, said he planned to send Salk a letter this week demanding that the dog be returned; if she is not, he plans to file suit in Los Angeles to “seek return of the dog and any damages permitted by law.”

In court, the lawyer said, Salk would have to prove not just that she’s a great caregiver but that the Keyeses are unqualified to keep their dog. “In most states, you have to do some pretty bad stuff to be disqualified as the owner of a dog,” he said.

In the days after Katrina and Rita, dozens of animal lovers descended upon New Orleans to help stranded pets. Many rescuers simply showed up to be dispatched like soldiers from the Lamar-Dixon shelter, an operation run mostly by the Louisiana SPCA, the Humane Society of the U.S. and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

After Lamar-Dixon was dismantled in October 2005, ad hoc groups of volunteers stayed, insisting there were still hundreds of animals to feed and shelter. Salk helped found a group called Animal Rescue New Orleans. In February 2006, it was turned over to New Orleans-based volunteers, who continue to run it.

“No one questions that these animals are alive today because of these efforts,” said Louisiana Assistant Atty. Gen. Mimi Hunley, who facilitates pet and owner reunions. But some in the animal welfare community contend that some rescuers took animal protection too far.

Said Charlotte Bass Lilly, who now runs Animal Rescue New Orleans: “I saw rescuers who said, ‘I’m not returning animals to this house.’ I said, ‘You’re off my convoy.’ I said, ‘When we come back, you’re not coming with us.’ ”

Most of the animal rescuers who went to New Orleans embraced a kind of urban animal welfare ethic: Pets should be micro-chipped and collared and never allowed to wander the streets off leash. Spaying and neutering are a must. Any hint of an ailment must be dealt with immediately.

Rescuers were dismayed to see so many animals in New Orleans that hadn’t been neutered and were suffering from heartworms. Some of the pit bulls they encountered bore facial cuts, a sign they may have been used for dogfights, which are illegal in every state.

Bass Lilly said that in Louisiana -- and not just working-class areas -- attitudes toward animal rearing are based on a more rural tradition.

“I hate to say it, but there’s a little bit of a plantation mentality that exists here,” Bass Lilly said. “It’s very rooted in traditions and habits.” Dogs visit the neighbors off leash: “You come out, you whistle for your dog, the dog comes back,” Bass Lilly said.

Pet owners don’t necessarily embrace neutering. “I can’t tell you how many good-income families have told me they want the children to have the experience of seeing one litter,” she said.

Ear cropping is simply a fashion in some of the poorer wards, where an aggressive-looking dog is prized, said Susan Eddlestone, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University’s School of Veterinary Medicine.

But much of the reluctance to neuter or test for heartworms, she believes, is a function of old-fashioned views and tight budgets.

“These are areas where people don’t have the money to put their animals on heartworm prevention and have their animals neutered,” said Eddlestone, who grew up in Louisiana.

Although the year-round presence of mosquitoes -- which transmit heartworms -- means dogs should be tested for the parasite, it actually takes two years for the disease to show up.

“People from up north think that’s an abuse to animals to have a heartworm-positive dog and not have it on medication,” said Eddlestone. “Well, the people did not even know. The dog was not even acting sick.”

Eddlestone helped run Louisiana State’s emergency animal shelter in Baton Rouge, which took in 2,000 animals from people fleeing the storms.

“The human-animal bond could not have been more exemplified by Katrina,” said Eddlestone. “People died because they couldn’t take their dog off the roof with them.” But the cultural differences did ratchet up tensions between the rescuers -- mostly white and middle-class -- and many of the evacuees -- mostly black and working-class -- who were forced to leave without their pets.

Salk is the niece of Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine, and the daughter of Lee Salk, the late psychologist and popular author.

Keyes was born and raised in New Orleans and lives just two miles from her mother, with whom she is close. At age 19, Keyes went to work as a carpenter. Three years ago she took the locksmith job at the Medical Center of Louisiana.

The two women have a couple of things in common: Both are in their 30s (Salk is 39; Keyes is 30) and both love their multiple dogs. Salk talked about that love in one of her few phone conversations with Keyes.

“I said, ‘We’re both moms in a way,’ ” Salk recalled. “I said, ‘Please be sensitive. I’ve loved this dog too. . . . She just kept saying, ‘No, I want my baby back.’ ”

Salk did consider giving up Sweetie in April. Her Labrador, Luna, attacked the pit bull a couple of times. Frightened by the fights, Salk hired a trainer. “They’re back to being the best of friends,” she said.

Salk also frets that Sweetie has aggression issues and wouldn’t do well in the Keyes household -- which has now been repopulated with new dogs.

“And to return her to a breeder in a country where we kill thousands of dogs?” Salk said, referring to Keyes’ selling the pups from Crown’s litter and the puppies of a new dog as well.

Keyes contends that Crown was well-fed, played in the yard and got along fine with the other dogs. She says Crown wasn’t suffering from heartworm and that she and her husband were treating Crown for intestinal worms under the instruction of their veterinarian. And Keyes said she was annoyed to find her new pit bull pregnant. “It wasn’t that I was breeding dogs,’” she said ruefully. “I can’t be everywhere.”

Keyes acknowledged that Crown got a botched ear cropping from a veterinary technician -- “this guy who clips ears for everybody who has pit bulls in New Orleans” -- and said that her current adult pit bull does not have cropped ears.

“Some of us down here in New Orleans have a bad reputation with pit bulls,” Keyes said. “Some people here have some dogfights and all that. I don’t like that. You can see the kind of dog I have raised.

“I said, ‘Pia, if she was aggressive, you wouldn’t even be close to her.’ ”

When Keyes and her husband returned to their house on Oct. 12, 2005, the scene was grim. There was a skeleton of a small dog outside and a dead dog inside. There was no sign of Blue -- a pit bull she had taken in for a friend -- or of Crown.

Keyes did not search for the dogs. “It was just so much confusion around that time I didn’t know where to start at,” she said.

But volunteers went looking. Most of the animals that went through the Lamar-Dixon shelter were photographed and logged at the Internet site www.petfinder.com. The site describes where the dogs were rescued and to which shelters they were taken.

In the spring of 2006, a member of the Katrina Animal Reunion Team, looking to connect some residents in the Seventh Ward with their rescued dogs, came across the Petfinder entry for a pit bull rescued in front of Kara Keyes’ house.

The rescuer, working in that area, placed a flier with the dog’s photo on the door of the Keyes house. If it was their dog, the flier instructed, the resident was to call Christiane Biagi of the Reunion Team.

A few hours later, Biagi got a phone call from an elated Kara Keyes.

Unfortunately, the Petfinder identification said the dog had been transported to Marin Humane in the Bay Area. When Biagi’s group called Marin Humane on Keyes’ behalf, the staff said the dog had never come through their center.

Ironically, it was Salk who had led volunteers to make the final connection.

In April, as Salk struggled to deal with the fighting between Sweetie and Luna, she e-mailed several animal rescuers, including one named Laura Bergerol.

“I am writing with a sad heart because it has become clear that we need to find a home for Sweetie -- truly the sweetest dog in the world,” the message began.

Bergerol, a Palo Alto-based professional photographer who had also volunteered in New Orleans as a rescuer, had photographed Salk and Sweetie in Los Angeles in the summer of 2006.

Bergerol also helps reunite Katrina victims with their lost pets, and she responded to the e-mail. “I said, ‘Pia, let me see if we can find the dog’s original owner.’ ”

Bergerol sent her photos of Salk and Sweetie to a member of the Katrina Animal Reunion Team, who quickly matched the photo of Sweetie with the Petfinder photo of the pit bull rescued in front of the Keyeses’ house. The volunteer sleuth called Biagi.

“Oh, my God, that’s Crown,” Biagi said. One reason they were so sure was the distinctive marking on the dog’s head in both pictures.

Bergerol e-mailed Salk about the discovery. By all accounts, Salk was livid.

“It took me a while to come off the defensive,” said Salk. “They were saying things like ‘Kara still wants the dog. . . .’ I said, ‘I’ve never met her. I don’t know who she is.’ I mean, this is the dog I’ve slept on the floor with for two years.”

“I don’t think this is a bad woman,” Salk added. “Everyone was screwed over by the hurricane.”

No one knows that better than Keyes.

“You know what?” she asked. “I thank Pia so much for what she did. When Crown came back, I was going to get her address and send her four dozen roses to show my appreciation. It hurt me so bad when she said, ‘I am not giving her back.’ ”

carla.hall@latimes.com