Nita Hemeter remembers the barking and meowing, and being able to look up from the middle of a New Orleans darkened by power outages to see "every star in the sky."

It was early September 2005, a little more than a week after Hurricane Katrina had torn across the Gulf Coast — and Hemeter, who'd snuck past a roadblock to rescue her own dog and cat, decided to stay.

"I knew there were animals all over that needed help because you could hear them hollering," she said. "It was just awful."

Estimates range widely, but it's believed that tens of thousands of pets — if not hundreds of thousands — were left behind during Katrina. Rescue workers in helicopters, boats and buses often didn't allow people to bring their animals. Many evacuation shelters wouldn't allow people to bring them in.

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