Just thought this would be useful to you. It is from my breaking news area for the media located at https://www.arkanimals.com. Please feel free to distribute:
Welcome to Ark Animals Answers!
Today’s Critter Chat concerns Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina devastated areas in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida–and animal rescue teams are standing by to assist pets and wild animals survivors. Here are a few things you can do to help:
-Donate funds to the main animal disaster rescue organizations like the American Humane Association, the Humane Society of the United States, and United Animal Nations. You’ll find direct links to their donation channels at arkanimals.com (above)
-Conduct fundraising for pets in your local area and send those in…while you also volunteer to establish disaster management plans for animals in your region.
-Use this time to prepare an animal disaster kit for your pets and develop a crisis plan for your family and neighborhood. A little bit of prevention goes a long way.
This is animal behaviorist, Diana Guerrero inviting you to take an armchair safari into the animal kingdom at www.arkanimals.com. Thanks for joining me for today’s Ark Animal Answers and feel free to contact me with your questions.
Podcast is available at: http://arkanimalanswers.podblaze.com please feel free to distribute via RSS from there.
WARNING:
I’ve only listed those agencies I KNOW work directly in rescue and whose funds go to animal rescue and related efforts. This email arrived in my box this am:
“This note is to ISOs, CIOs, and other interested parties on our email list. In the aftermath of the hurricane damage, many people are eager to help by sending donations to various charities. There are many good and reputable charities, but this is a heads-up that some disaster relief donation requests are not legitimate.
Please be advised that there are numerous scams already in place to take advantage of potential givers. Some of these are email and phishing scams, some involve fake web sites, and some are phony charities (and various combinations of all of these). In some cases the scammers are after credit card numbers or other personal information to be used for identity theft; in other cases they just want to take your donation. (Not all of the disaster relief scams are internet based – you may see people collecting money on street corners and in front of markets and I don’t know of any way to identify which ones are there for what reasons.)
There are numerous legitimate web sites and mail addresses for disaster relief donations. Please use your good judgment in deciding what to do. (There is a link below to the FEMA web site, with a list of reputable charities.)
Below is a clip from the SANS Institute’s web site, indicating that there may also be a danger of worms, viruses, and spyware in hurricane-related emails.
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Fake Hurricane emails Like after similar events in the past, we do expect scams and viruses to take advantage of this situation. Please be careful with e-mails containing ‘hurricane videos’ as attachments, or e-mail asking for donations. Refer to fema.gov for a list of reputable agencies (http://www.fema.gov/news/newsrelease.fema?id=18473) or donate to organizations you trust and have past experience with.
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Please encourage your department’s computer users to avoid opening hurricane video attachments and to be cautious about email solicitations for donations. These represent not only a privacy risk to the computer users, but possibly a security threat to the state.”
