What:         Teen team travels around the state, interviewing people who dress up as superheroes and do good deeds. (The kids told me there really are such people!)

What then:     They decide to find some "real" heroes to interview as a counterpoint.

And so:     They come to Best Friends!

The teen team is from Spyhop, which describes itself as a "youth media arts and education center." They spent a day at the sanctuary, and interviewed me as one of their "heroes".

Here I am, in a famously heroic moment.

Well, OK: no one has to be heroic with Juniper Kitty. And in any case, the true heroes are folks here like Sherry Woodard, Shelley Thayer and Mckenzie Garcia, who have spent months helping kitties like Juniper to recover from the appalling trauma that led to the Great Kitty Rescue in the Nevada desert this time last year. Even when sick and starving, the cats were terrified of people and armed to the teeth with claws.

Today, most of these 800+ cats have graduated from what became known as Miss Sherry's Finishing School for Cats here at the sanctuary. And most of them have been adopted – a miracle in itself. Others, like Juniper, have moved from their special care center over to Kittyville, our cat village.

The room in the photo where we were filming is in the CalMar house – named after Cal and his wife, Martha, two members of Best Friends who were planning to retire and build a house near the sanctuary. But then Martha passed away. Cal decided to build a house anyway – in her memory – for cats with feline leukemia, FIV, and other special needs. CalMar opened a couple years ago.

The kids did a great interview, but I was stumped for a moment when they asked me who's my own favorite hero. I could only think of a long list of people who have been in some of Best Friends major rescues – like right now in the Iowa flood rescues. But they wanted one in particular. So I chose a guy from the coast guard whom we heard from after the Hurricane Katrina rescue.

Here's the story:

It begins with a typical scene that one of our own teams came across during the Katrina rescue. The boat had been dragged up to the side of the waters.

And this is the dog we found inside. She was starving and dehydrated, covered in parasites and diesel fuel, and could barely stand. But back at the rescue center, she was soon OK. The team affectionately named her Diesel, and a few weeks later she was sent out, like the 6,000 others Best Friends brought out of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, to be fostered and, if her family didn't come forward, to be adopted.

A year later, a book was published about the Best Friends rescue work, called Not Left Behind. And a few weeks after publication, we got this letter from a young man in Illinois:

We let Brandon know that Diesel was now in a good home and he could set his mind at rest.

Truth is, Best Friends worked side-by-side with the military all through the Katrina rescue. They had their mission; we had ours. We helped each other in numerous cases.

I told the kids from Spyhop that in my terms, Brandon qualifies as a true hero. Hope you agree.