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Rice
obviously gets excited when he talks about domains but there
is another subject that he is equally passionate about. That is dogs
(and no I don’t mean bad domains – I mean the canine variety).
Rice and his fiancé Valerie live on the South River
in
Annapolis, Maryand but he also has a farm in western
Maryland that his father keeps an eye on. “At the moment, 23 dogs
reside on the farm,” Rice said. “At least that is the number
my nieces came up with when they tried to count them all a few
weeks ago!”
Rice,
his fiancee Valerie (at right) and nieces at Eric's
western
Maryland farm with just a few of the dogs that live on the
property
You
see, Rice
spends a great deal of his free time rescuing dogs in distress. “Over
the years I have responded to several disasters where animals were
affected. After Hurricane Katrina hit, I spent four weeks in
New
Orleans rescuing animals, helping to find, feed and reunite
abandoned pets with their owners. People will never understand how
horrible it was for people who tried desperately to stay with
their pets but were forced to leave them behind after suffering
for many days in that environment. Those people became
frantic to get these pets back and I tried to help as many of them
as I could," Rice said.
"I
also started a blog related to animal rescue in New Orleans at EricsDogBlog.com
(just scroll down to the bottom and start reading from past to
present.) It became very popular during Katrina rescue efforts and
had thousands of daily readers. It’s actually a great story of
the internet as over 30 people from all over the world read my
blog, called me and hopped on a plane to join me. We had an
entire system for getting people into the city through federal
agents, police and FBI agents who were not about to let all of
these pets suffer. None of them had orders to help but they
did in their own little ways like looking the other way as we went
in and out of checkpoints," Rice recalled.
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"People
do a good job of fending for themselves, domestic animals do not (especially when they are locked behind a closed door as
150,000+
animals were in New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish). Someone had to
get them out and it was apparent the government had no plan to do
so. Watching those images on TV many of us in the rescue
arena knew we’d be in the middle of New Orleans in a matter of
days whether allowed in or not. As people were forced out we were
sneaking in. I flew into an airport several hours away and rented
the biggest hauling truck I could find. We slept on
top of it because it was the only place we could find a breeze in
the 110 degree heat," Rice said.
"I
was on a boat in the city as soon as I could get a plan together.
In some ways the animal rescue community was better prepared than
FEMA, as we rescued and sheltered over 25,000 animals at 6 staging
areas, many of those animals rescued by what soon became known as
rogue rescue groups like mine.
We
normally left the city at night but left one or two people
to sleep at the location we had set up with the dogs. That
person was given a gun that one of the federal agents had
left us." |
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Rice
in New Orleans
Gas was a precious commodity after Katrina hit |
Rice
will never forget his first night watching over the rescued
animals. "You can imagine how dark it was – pitch dark and
in a bad area of town. It was the most eerie night of my
life," Rice said. "But if the government was not
going to rescue those animals for people then we were. These
animals showed an amazing thankfulness each time we freed them
from houses and took them to safety. You could read
everything they had been through right on their faces.”
“Animals and I are a natural
fit," Rice said. "I have always connected
with them at a different level than many people. Lots of
people like animals but animals know I am on their side when I am
around them. The more we find out about their ability to
perceive emotion and feel some of the same feelings many of us do,
the more I feel the need to get involved in making sure they are
treated well. While I am not a vegetarian, I don't think animals
need to suffer on the way to my plate."
| "This
was one of the first dogs I rescued (see top photo at right). He was dying in that
pipe and could have been in that drain for weeks. After
getting him I knew I would be in New Orleans for a long time
because animals like him where everywhere you looked," Rice
said. "You
can’t see it but the area was totally demolished and had taken
15 feet of water. There were dogs in every 5th house and hundreds
on the streets just in this small community. So you can
imagine the scope of the problem given that the area damaged was
the size of Great Britain. The two pictures tell the story pretty
clearly."
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Eric Rice with dog rescued from drainage pipe
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"Since Katrina I have been a
consultant on a documentary on the subject that will be finished in just a few weeks. I think many will find it fascinating. The initial screenings are getting great reviews as people can’t believe the uniqueness of the content or how much footage we had. Animal rescue was often underreported but you can imagine its extent if we took 25,000 animals out of the city with thousands more that never made it.
The film, produced and directed by Tom McPhee, is called
An American Opera." (Editor's
note: the movie trailer can be found here). |
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Rice
taking a makeshift shower |
"The
best way I can sum up my time in New Orleans is to imagine waking
up with a few kids and pets in your house which was being devoured
by a fire. Every second counts in saving yourself, family
and pets. The adrenaline kicks in and over the next 5
minutes you fight for them all to live."
"New Orleans was that
adrenaline rush except it lasted for 28 straight days. Every
second counted in a race to save the lives of these pets; sleeping
meant a few more died so you didn’t sleep. I excelled in
that environment as I have always been able to scavenge my way to
success. It was the Wild West and we were fending for ourselves
in the middle of that city. I will never lose the connection
I made to that area and those desperate pet owners," Rice
said.
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So,
what you may ask, do dogs have to do with domains? It's my belief
that if you know where someone who is
consistently successful has been and understand where their
outlook on life compels them to go, you will
have all of the information you need to understand what produces
success in any endeavor.
Postscript
For those interested in learning more and seeing some remarkable
video about animal rescue and the
movement's heroic efforts in New Orleans, below are some
additional notes and links from Eric Rice on the subject.
-
"Here
is a website that posted many of my pictures and is probably the best
pictorial overview of just what the emotions in New Orleans were like. Start at
the post you will arrive at through the link below and go backwards.
Each post is a different theme with pictures from animal rescue in
New Orleans that show what we were dealing with: http://justthinkingaboutit.blogspot.com/2005/11/heart-breakers.html"
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"I
think this video
(requires Quicktime
7 to view) that I shot pretty much sums up my time in New Orleans and
what we were doing. This video was approximately 25
days after Katrina. This dog had been in this house for 25 days.
He was lucky as
most dogs we found in the houses after the first few weeks were
deceased."
| "This
video (requires Quicktime 7) shows exactly what we had to do to find an owner once we had
rescued a dog. I found this beautiful black lab starving in
a church. He had a tag with only a phone number. Of
course the numbers went to houses that had no working phones, but I used
technology in the form of national databases to do a reverse
lookup on the phone number. With that I could find the
address and then go break into the house looking for mail or
anything that would help me find the owner."
"I found this
owner (see Earl's picture at right) in Houston. He was a 74-year-old retired Navy veteran
who had gotten the dog when his wife passed away four years
earlier. He was airlifted off his roof after four days in
his attic and they left his dog on the roof. He had been
searching for the dog since the second he got to Houston. It was
all he cared about. You can probably imagine that phone call
once I located him and told him I had the dog." |
Earl
gets his dog back
45 days after Katrina struck |
*****
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