His snout wrapped shut with a muzzle, Sheriff rests his head in the lap of Austin Soto, a Best Friends Animal Society staffer who is trying to calm the huge black dog while his colleague, Jeff Popowich, shaves a small patch of fur from Sheriff's lower back.

Using a piece of cotton drenched in alcohol, Popowich gently swabs Sheriff's furless skin. Then, in one smooth stroke, he plunges a 2-inch needle deep into the dog's muscle, then in between his vertebrae, and injects him with a canine heartworm treatment.

Sheriff doesn't flinch.

"Hooray for Sheriff!" Popowich says.

"Woo, buddy!" Soto says, rubbing the dog's head.

A year after a Best Friends Animal Society team plucked 4,000 cats and dogs from the floodwaters of New Orleans, its work is still not done. About 50 dogs and a handful of cats, once marooned on porches and rooftops in the blazing Louisiana heat, still call the Best Friends sanctuary home.

Like Sheriff, who was snagged from the St. Bernard Parish, many of them continue to struggle with such ailments as heartworm, broken bones that didn't heal well, and rocks and sand packed deep in their ear canals. Others have behavioral problems and are only now beginning to trust their caretakers.

The organization put out a call for help from dog trainers who could help rehabilitate family pets that spent up to five traumatizing months on the streets fighting, foraging and running scared.

"A lot of them were dogs who didn't have much handling to begin with," said Best Friends staffer Ethan Gurney.

Sheriff is one of the Magnificent Seven - the last seven animals to leave the St. Francis Animal Sanctuary in Tylertown, Miss., where Best Friends set up camp for animals rescued in New Orleans - and wears a red collar, meaning only staff can handle him.

Aggressive at first, Sheriff vigorously defended piles of vomit. On the streets in New Orleans, the dog learned it was food, "a resource," Popowich said. After just two weeks at the sanctuary in Tylertown, however, the Rottweiler was kissing volunteers through his chain-link dog run.

Another dog, Meatball, also a member of the Magnificent Seven, is being weaned off a cinder block he tosses around as a toy.

"It's nice to see them trust people again and just to be happy dogs and knowing that they are going to go to a home," Popowich said. "They're done. They don't have to work anymore. They can be couch potatoes if they want. They can just hang out in the backyard and sunbathe if they want. They can just be dogs, which is all they ever needed."

The Best Friends team spent 249 days in the South - the longest commitment of any animal organization - scouring the St. Bernard and Orleans parishes and caring for them in Tylertown or at Celebration Station, a defunct amusement park in Metairie, La.

After Hurricane Katrina, the organization received $5.8 million in donations to buy food and supplies for the four-legged evacuees. By May 2006, Best Friends had about $289,000 of that money left, which is helping pay for the special care of Katrina cats and dogs now living at the sanctuary.

One of them is a black-and-white semi-feral cat who escaped the floodwaters by living on the ledge of an apartment building, said Best Friends cat manager Mike Bzdewka.

Monkey, who has undergone two surgeries to remove cancerous lesions, lives in the rafters of a room designated for those felines infected with FIV, the cat equivalent of HIV. Her piercing green eyes follow the staff from her perch above.

Skittish around people, Monkey hisses and climbs to higher ground when approached. While living on the street, she skittered down drainage pipes at night to leave the ledge and hunt for food, Bzdewka said. Slowly, she is becoming more relaxed around people.

Another Katrina pet evacuee, Clark, was hit by debris during the hurricane. The feline suffered a broken jaw, lost an eye and has a snaggletooth that rests outside his lip. Clark's nasal passages were also crushed and grew back so thin he snorts as he breathes.

Bzdewka fell in love with the battered animal and took him home.

"I'm not a hero," said Bzdewka, who helped rescue cats in New Orleans. "The animals are the heroes."

Some lucky pets, like Patches the pit bull, were reunited with their owners.

On Aug. 11, almost a full year after the hurricane, owner Walter Williams picked up his pooch from the Spindletop Refuge, a Houston-based rescue group specializing in pit bulls. Patches was one of the 4,000 animals rescued by Best Friends.

But while 15,000 pets were rescued by multiple animal organizations, many more drowned or starved to death, said Best Friends CEO Paul Berry. An estimated 125,000 animals lost their lives in the disaster, prompting Best Friends to write its own rapid-response plan.

That plan will be put to the test in the coming weeks, when a Best Friends team lands in Beirut, Lebanon, on a cargo plane to airlift about 300 cats and dogs rescued from animal shelters that were damaged or destroyed by Israeli bombs.

"It's desperate," Berry said.

The organization will spend an estimated $500,000 on the operation, dubbed "Paws for Peace," and will send in a veterinarian and several others in advance of the airlift to prepare the animals to leave Lebanon.

The animal death toll in the wake of Hurricane Katrina also prompted Louisiana lawmakers to pass the Louisiana Pet Evacuation Bill in late June, which allows people to evacuate with their pets as long as there is no danger to human life.

The bill also calls for animals shelters to be provided "side by side" with human shelters wherever possible, and for pets to be allowed on public transportation.

"There are some big, positive changes that have come out of this," Berry said.

Off a dirt road in Angel Canyon, near a towering wall of red rock, is the Best Friends animal cemetery. Sprinkled among the hundreds of tiny headstones are groups of wind chimes that sing in a gentle breeze blown in by an afternoon storm.

In the back corner of the cemetery is a memorial for those animals who never left New Orleans.

Blue and purple Mardi Gras beads hang on one corner of the memorial, while a black dog collar with spikes hangs on another.

It reads: "So long as we live, they too shall live, for they are now a part of us, as we remember them."

lrosetta@sltrib.com

Best Friends Animal Society and Katrina

* About 15,000 animals were rescued from New Orleans.

* Of those, 4,000 were rescued by the Best Friends Animal Society.

* The organization received $5.8 million in donations for its rescue efforts. Less than $300,000 of that is left, and it is being used to pay for the special care of Katrina animals at their Kanab sanctuary.

* Best Friends' next rescue mission: airlifting 300 dogs and cats from war-torn Beirut.

* About 15,000 animals were rescued from New Orleans

* Of those, 4,000 were rescued by the Best Friends Animal Society

* The organization received $5.8 million in donations for their rescue efforts. Less than $300,000 of that is left, and is being used to pay for the special care of Katrina animals residing at the their Kanab sanctuary.

* Best Friends' next rescue mission: airlifting 300 dogs and cats from war-torn Beirut.