race

Mine (Director: Geralyn Pezanoski): Winner of the Audience Award at the 2009 SXSW Film Festival, Mine is a gut-wrenching look at some of the for­gotten vic­tims of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina: pets and their owners. My wife and I are thinking of becoming dog owners, and after watching this film, I’m more con­vinced than ever that pets really do become part of the family.

In the after­math of Hurricane Katrina, thou­sands of evacuees were forced to leave their cats and dogs behind. Shelters wouldn’t accept animals, and in some cases, people left their pets thinking they’d be gone just a few days. We all know what happened. Many people still haven’t returned to the city, and those who did had to wait months. In the mean­time, more than 150,000 animals died. Thanks to the efforts of volun­teers, sev­eral thou­sand were res­cued, but many were shipped to other states, and when their owners didn’t claim them within a few days, some were adopted out to new fam­ilies. This is where the film gets really interesting.

The failure of the gov­ern­ment to adequately respond to the cata­strophe has been the sub­ject of many fine doc­u­mentary films, but in this case, ordinary people around the country stepped in to do all they could to rescue these pets who’d been left behind. Unfortunately, there is a polit­ical edge to some of these “rescue” organ­iz­a­tions, as some of the former owners soon found out. For instance, many dog owners in New Orleans don’t have their dogs spayed or neutered, whether for fin­an­cial or cul­tural reasons. Among the rescue com­munity, this is con­sidered irre­spons­ible. As well, many of the res­cued animals turned out to have heart­worm infec­tions, some­thing that can be pre­vented with med­ic­a­tion. Again, prob­ably due to fin­an­cial hard­ship or simply ignor­ance, many New Orleans res­id­ents hadn’t treated their pets for heartworm.

The end result was that many of the rescue organ­iz­a­tions saw the ori­ginal owners as neg­li­gent, and after treating the animals for sick­ness, they would spay or neuter them and then adopt them out to more “suit­able” fam­ilies in their areas. When the ori­ginal owners were finally able to track their pets down, the rescue organ­iz­a­tions would tell them that their pet had a new family, and the new family didn’t want to give it up.

We follow sev­eral of these heart­breaking cus­tody battles throughout the course of the film. Though it’s only hinted at, race and class are central to how the stories are played out. Since pets are con­sidered prop­erty under the law, it should simply be a matter of having one’s prop­erty returned, but in the emo­tional bat­tle­field of pet own­er­ship, things are rarely that simple. Having already sur­vived the hur­ricane and the loss of their homes and pos­ses­sions, the res­id­ents of New Orleans have no money to hire law­yers to pursue their missing pets, so a number of volun­teers help them to find law­yers who are willing to work pro bono on the cases. It’s an ugly pro­cess, and one par­tic­ular phone con­ver­sa­tion (part of which appears in the trailer embedded below) between the owner of a missing dog and the head of the rescue organ­iz­a­tion who got him out of New Orleans sums up the film in a nut­shell. People who love animals can often forget that there is a person attached to that animal. If you care about animals, you cannot pre­tend that that rela­tion­ship never existed.

You don’t have to be a dog lover to enjoy Mine. And even if you think you’ve seen all there is to see about Hurricane Katrina, don’t let that keep you away from this insightful film, which has exposed the class divi­sions of our society more clearly than any­thing I’ve seen in a long time.

Official site of the film

(8/10)

Tagged as: class, hurricanekatrina, pets, race

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