This documentary concerns the impact that Hurricane Katrina had on the pets of New Orleans. It’s estimated that over 150,000 pets died during the perfect storm, and much of this staggering loss of life is attributed to voluntary and involuntary abandonment. Many pet owners, most of them poor, had no choice but to leave their animals at home with nothing more than a bowl of food and a prayer. Hotels/motels would not accept pets, and the Superdome only provided protection for humans—which was a very good thing, because only total chaos could have resulted from compounding human chaos with pet chaos.
Mine wants us to see the close connection (soul to soul) between animals and their owners, and from this recognition come to understand how horrible it was for pets to be so abandoned, left to fend for themselves, and (if not rescued) to die alone in the wet and cold. “When I called and asked what the city was doing about the animals,” says one passionate pet person in the documentary, “I was told everything was okay, they had 30 animal rescuers out there. And I said, ‘Thirty! It’s a city of 500,000 people. We need 30,000 rescuers for the pets!'” (I recall this statement entirely from memory—the figures are correct but it is not the exact wording.)
Okay, let’s get down to it. Do animals have souls? No, that is too religious. Let’s try this: Do animals have mind? Can a dog think? Are thoughts in a cat’s head in the way thoughts are in a human’s head? The answer? Yes, mind is in them. Our pets are really thoughtful things/beings, and yes, the ones that were abandoned most certainly felt a great amount of fear and terror during the storm that flooded the famous American city. But do animals have as much feeling and understanding as the human animal? No, they do not. They have a dimmer perception of the world, or at least of the color-bright world that humans experience—which is not only an earthly world but also galactic (with stars, black holes, comets that fly from the Oort cloud) and particular (neutrons, electrons, and even quarks). Animals have mind but not our kind of mind. Yes, this is all very much like Leibniz’s monads, but it is hard to believe that a dog looks at a star and really thinks about it. There, I have said what I wanted to say. 
What a stupid comment. Who cares whether animals think exactly the way we think? If we’ve made them dependent on us, we owe it to them to take care of them. What happened to animals in Hurricane Katrina was a crime, and it’s obscene and disgusting. Unlike the people who mostly died by drowning, the animals died a slow excuciating death over weeks by starvation. What created the chaos was mostly the authorities. People are certainly capable of taking care of animals in a crisis. If FEMA hadn’t been so inept, the Superdome could have been supplied with enough food for people and their pets. Or it could have set up a separate center. I can’t understand people who would agree to leave their pets behind, even at gunpoint. They would have had to drag me away. I certainly can’t understand people who wouldn’t try to sneak back later by a back route (one man did just this, although he waited an awfully long time) once they figured out they would have to stay away longer than the authorities had told them they would and that the food they left behind must be about to run out. (And if you don’t have enough money to keep more than a day’s food on hand, you shouldn’t have a pet). If the authorities had told people to leave their babies behind, would they have done it? There are 2 bottom lines here: people have too much trust in and obedience to authority, and animals have a terribly low status in our society. I assume Mudede would call me one of those passionate pet owners. What’s wrong with being passionate about things that matter?