The post-Hurricane Katrina "lessons" (if that's what they are) seem to be piling up.

During the emergency, citizens' guns were confiscated illegally, and they are now having to petition to get them back, and meanwhile state and federal legislation is in the pipeline to stop this sort of abuse from happening again.

Losing your gun is bad enough, because without a gun in an emergency, you can find yourself defenseless against any number of things. But another -- perhaps more tragic -- thing that happened to people in New Orleans was that they lost their dogs -- not because they were confiscated officially, but because they either left them behind when they fled for their lives, or else they weren't allowed to take them when they were evacuated.

The story about the little boy crying because his dog couldn't accompany his evacuation touched a nerve nationally. For me, so did this article in the Sunday Inquirer, for it raises some very disturbing issues:

Sheila Combs lost nearly everything in Hurricane Katrina: her home, her possessions, her job and - what really broke her heart - her 2-year-old mutt, Rocket.

Combs assumed that the chow-Finnish Spitz mix had died after she, her mother and her 9-year-old son were evacuated from New Orleans to the Houston Astrodome.

So it seemed to be a miracle last month when a volunteer group seeking to reunite Katrina pets with their masters discovered Rocket alive and flourishing in Doylestown.

Except that the pooch isn't Rocket anymore - he's Rusty. And his new owners have no intention of giving him back.

The resulting tug-of-war is among dozens of cases nationwide in which allegations of class bias have been raised by Katrina survivors attempting to reclaim beloved pets from the Good Samaritans who took them in.

Not to generalize (as I know some rescue people who aren't like this) but the "rescue" mentality has a strong appeal to people who possess the holier-than-thou form of altruism Ayn Rand used to condemn. They rationalize that because they've got the animal, that they've "saved" it from more than just the Hurricane. They've also saved it from inferior beings.

"It's almost entirely a movement of animals from poor blacks to middle-class whites," said Steven Wise, a Florida animal-rights lawyer involved in several custody battles.

People who first considered themselves foster caregivers now say some Katrina pet lovers don't deserve their animals back.

In what has been called a cultural misunderstanding, they cite neglect - including failure to have animals spayed or neutered and not getting rabies and heartworm prevention - as evidence of unfit care.

Cultural misunderstanding? I guess it's fair to say that people who sexually mutilate perfectly healthy dogs and imagine they're superior to people who don't are guilty of a cultural misunderstanding. Might even be understatement.

Army Lt. Jay Johnson, who was in Iraq when the hurricane hit, has filed suit against the SPCA of Texas to retrieve his shih tzu, Missy, whom he left with relatives in New Orleans. And Linda Charles, 41, is suing to recover her German shepherd, Precious, from the Humane Society of North Texas.

"It's aggravating that people took not only our dog, but lots of people's dogs, and they're doing what they want with them," said Charles, of New Orleans, who now resides in Baton Rouge, La.

After the storm, many who fled left provisions for their pets and expected to return in a few days. When they didn't, the Humane Society of America and others collected the animals and shipped them to kennels around the country.

Rescue workers left spray-painted notes on houses and posted information on Internet sites, such as Petfinder.com, to help owners locate their animals. But by the time Katrina survivors were resettled and ready to search, many pets had found new homes.

Some groups set Dec. 31 as the deadline for owners to retrieve animals. After that, they were considered eligible for permanent homes.

But under Louisiana law, residents have three years to claim lost property, said Mimi Hunley, a member of the Louisiana Attorney General's Office who is helping mediate pet disputes.

And pets are property, Hunley said. "It really is that simple."

Wise, who is involved in the Charles and Johnson cases, said it's hard to understand why the animals aren't being turned over.

"These people lost everything," Wise said of the hurricane victims. "The only thing they have is their family, and these dogs are their family."

The SPCA of Texas and Humane Society of North Texas declined to comment on the cases.

It's a disgrace that people who love their animals so much that they are still trying to get them back are encountering resistance. But it isn't surprising.

There is, of course, something worse than losing a gun or losing a dog -- and that is losing your life. In today's Inquirer I see that people in nursing homes may have been deliberately killed because it was too much trouble to save them :

NEW ORLEANS - A doctor and two nurses who labored at a sweltering, flooded hospital in Hurricane Katrina's chaotic aftermath were arrested and accused yesterday of murdering four trapped and desperately ill patients with injections of morphine and a sedative.

"We're talking about people that pretended that maybe they were God," Louisiana Attorney General Charles C. Foti said. "And they made that decision."

The defendants were booked on charges of being "principals to second-degree murder," which carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison.

The three - Dr. Anna Pou, 50; nurse Cheri A. Landry, 49; and nurse Lori L. Budo, 43 - were the first medical professionals charged in a monthslong criminal investigation into whether many of New Orleans' sick and elderly were abandoned or put out of their misery in the days after the storm.

All three were released without bail.

Pou, an ear, nose and throat specialist, and Landry and Budo were accused of deliberately killing four patients, ages 62 to 90, at Memorial Medical Center with a "lethal cocktail" of morphine and Versed, a sedative. No patient names were released.

No one knowswhether that happened in the New Orleans deaths. The worst-case scenario would be if the doctors "tried to save themselves and didn't want to feel guilty leaving the patients behind and killed them," Caplan said.

The best-case scenario, he said, would be if those accused believed that "all possibility of maintaining people on technology has come to an end, you're out of power and your battery power is running out, and you say, 'I can't let these people suffer.' "

"Under American law, neither scenario would be excusable," Caplan said.

Unfortunately, this makes the bad side all the more horrendous to behold. People are justly horrified by opportunists who engage in looting and rioting, but I think a good argument can be made that people who abuse positions of trust are worse.