Excuse me!
Where is our face time?
I think we should rename this blog the Crazy Chicken blog. MrCrockPotPants!
I think it has a nice ring to it, don't you?
Ahem.
I saaaaaaid.....DON'T YOU???
That's right.
Excellent. I think we're done here.
Excuse me.
Is that your brain I see? It still looks delicious.
Nom nom nom nom.....
Actually, I think it may only take 6 good pecks to reach the edges of your brain.
Did someone mention something about brains?
Hold on, let me get a closer look....
Hmmmmmmm......
OKAY CHICKENS. NICE TALKING TO YOU. BUH BYE NOW. BUH BYE.
These chickens are crazy. I squatted in their pen today visiting and they were totally harassing me. Pecking my ring, pecking my phone, pecking the buttons on my jeans. They even pecked my lower back. Little buggars.
We had a serious storm this morning. SERIOUS. I got ready as normal and drove to work and noticed as I was partway there it was not as bright as normal....some people even had their headlights on.
Then I got to work.
And within a half hour it was pitch dark. It was so dark we could not see the building across the street. We couldn't see anything. If I had woken up at that point, I would have guessed it was midnight. PITCH DARK.
It was the craziest thing ever. Because it was dark in the night....then dawn came and it got light....and then within an hour or two it was DARK AS MIDNIGHT again.
The storm was severe but passed without any major damage. When I got home, my neighbor's field was halfway flooded. We must have gotten A LOT of rain here.
We have even had flash flood warnings off and on for the last week. Fortunately, I am at the top of a hill, so in order for my house to flood, my neighbors will be completely under water. Even the chickens would be above the flood line, and my backyard slopes downhill (they are about halfway down).
We didn't have crazy weather like this back in California!
Speaking of which.....a little about me.....I'm from California, born and raised. Have always loved animals, so started volunteering at an animal shelter when I turned 16 and basically stayed there until I was about 25. Volunteered a few years and then started actually working there. As a volunteer, I started taking pictures of the animals and made a website to showcase them for adoption. I did this for years, slowly tapering off as life moved along.
I have about three years worth of weekly (or more often) pictures of mostly dogs and some cats, impounded at that shelter. It is kind of amazing to go through them, as sometimes you see the same dogs over and over. As a puppy...then a few months later as a teenager....then a year or so later as an adult.
Lots of sad endings.
I sometimes think about using all of these years and years worth of pictures for some sort of website or book project. I have some really incredibly sad pictures. Unfortunately, many are not great quality.....
But still sad.
It was a very high kill shelter. Looking back through the pics, I can still remember which ones made it, which ones didn't.....which ones I do not know for sure but can pretty much guess. Which ones tugged at my heart strings.
This was the sweetest dog ever.
Such a sad face.
Cute kitten. No idea if adopted or not.
And one of my favorite pictures of all time.
That puppy was adopted.
There was one that "got away". That should have been my cat.
We had a huge animal cruelty seizure. A local "rescue" that was actually a hoarder. Over 300 animals. Mostly in horrible shape.....cats all sick or mangy or wild or all of the above. She was semi-feral. Would give you stink eye and maybe even hiss.....but if you could get your hands on her she was fine. I worked with her often to try to tame her down. She would meow at me when I went to her cage and once I started petting her, she would purr. She even head butted me a few times.
Every time we had evaluations on the seizure cats, to weed out the ones that were obviously just "unadoptable" (not recovering from illness, aggressive, wild) I could push her through. I could reach right in and pick her up, hold her and pet her. A (good) rescue took a few cats here and there and we talked to them about maybe taking her.
Then I moved to Tennessee. I took Norman with me and lived with my sister and her husband in Tennessee while getting a job and eventually buying a house. As soon as I had my house, I emailed my old coworkers to see if she was still available. I was going to have her flown out to me.
She had been put to sleep a week after I stopped working there. Although I did not really expect her to still be there "waiting" 6 months later....it still makes me tear up thinking about her.
Animal Number 276.
She was extremely timid, but did not have a mean bone in her body.
Every time I scroll through shelter websites and see a cat that looks like her, it makes me cringe.
So that is a little tidbit about me. I no longer work directly with shelters or rescue groups. After working within the shelter system for over 7 years, I was pretty burned out by the time I left.
I currently have a "boring" job. I work in a corporate office for a large company that is......construction related. I think someday I will get back in the humane animal care field. You can definitely make more changes from the inside than out. The last few years I would go through all the animals to be euthanized every morning and pull any that were iffy, do my own temperament test on them, and if they "passed" and were something "rescuable" I would hold them over and try to find rescues to take them. I had decent relationships with a bunch of local rescues and we were able to get hundreds of animals a year out into rescues through that work. I still check into the old websites and can tell a few of the rescues are still getting animals from them.
When I left, there was a lot of worry that the "rescue" work that I had been heading would taper off or not continue. I have no idea if they move the same volume of animals that I did, but can tell they are still moving some.
Well now that I have totally depressed everyone including myself, I think that is enough for now. I don't really talk much about my "past life" on here, so maybe I will start bringing that up a bit more. There are a lot of really great "success stories". Animals that had really horrible things happen to them that we were able to save. Actually, to make this less depressing, I will talk about one before I go.
This cat was found as a stray....and had either been lit on fire, or thrown into a fire. You can see her singed whiskers.....and her entire belly, lower chest and inside legs were burned.
Even with very painful injuries, she was very sweet.
Ouch.
She was given medical care, held until she began to recover and then sent to a rescue and later adopted. Turns out she was already spayed and everything. She was such a star for her treatments, that she kept that as a name in her new home.
This doesn't apply to Star since she "made it".....but sometimes I look at all of these pictures I have of animal after animal after animal after animal.......that did not make it. And I think that, without that picture, its almost as though they never existed. Like Cat #276. She didn't even have a name. I am probably the only person who even remembers she ever existed in the first place. Yes, there is paperwork on her from her stay at the shelter and the court case. Cat #276. Gry tabby. Adult. Caution, go slow. That is about it. That is the summation of her life.
Cat #276.
It makes me want to use all of the pictures I have to do something. Make a difference somehow. I have kept them all of these years, backed up in a few places just in case. I periodically scroll through them (there are thousands, if not tens of thousands) and wonder what can be done.
Any ideas?
7 comments:
I don't have any ideas, but I don't know if you need any. I was really moved and touched just by the way you wrote about the animals. . .and then the coda, where you wrote about why you wanted to write about them. . .I don't know, I think that might be all you need. I mean, it's an idea that can be developed further, but a book or a blog documenting the lives of euthanized animals, contrasted with the brief file notes on them--I would absolutely read that. A closer look, a humane look, showing that they touched someone's life and that they had lives, and that animals are worth saving/neutering in the first place. I think that is good.
I worked at a shelter for a couple of years. Most of the animals that get euthanized would be great if they could only find a person that could understand them and give them the support they needed to live in a normal home situation. I rescued quite a few cats while I was there as they seem to have a hrder time finding homes than the dogs. I have one who came in with severe frost bite and on the verge of starving to death. He was a declawed obviously indoor cat who had been outside for who knows how long and it had been minus 40 for days. He is now a pudgy little food destroyer who would cuddle 24 hours a day if I would only sit still.
Write a book. Track down some happy endings and photograph the animals that are still alive now.
I don't think someone has ever written a book about the cruelty in the world in this light of humanity. It's so brave, yet cruel at the same time.
The pictures could be an amazing story.
I was kinda wondering if YOU'D NEVER EVER POST SAD PICTURES OR STORIES EVER, EVER, EVER AGAIN. Or at least post a warning in the title. Something. Oh my gawd, I am bawling. Sobbing uncontrollably. Not that it takes much these days, my own dog is very sick and we can't do much more than keep her comfortable now. So I'm weepy at the drop of a hat. Having a mini-breakdown of some sort.
Seriously though, thanks for sharing those experiences...a real eye opener and made me walk over and hug each one of the critters we are blessed to have around us.
I'd buy any book you wrote, just to support you, but I probably couldn't read it if it was sad, ha ha ha. I'd prefer a funny one.
BTW, I met Alanna's cat. Unusual little critter but definitely a sweet little character despite his ordeal. Not that any one of her animals are usual, ha ha ha. Sorry Alanna, it's true!
oh boy! i sure picked a day to read your blog for the first time! i volenteered at a shelter when i was younger, i am sooooo glad that i didn't take pictures. it all came rushing back just now though. it is nice that someone, somewhere, noticed that they exsisted. thank you for your time there.
I think it is great that you took these pictures. You should write a book or make another blog about animals in shelters. Give people faces to look at to remind them that they do not need to breed their animals. That they can go to a shelter and save one. I too use to work at a shelter for a year. It was right next to the prision I worked at and I always wondered why they couldn't combine the two. Have the inmates work with the dogs and cats who need a little more socialization before they are able to go to good homes. It would be a great way to honor these animals! I remember always that Thursdays were "the day" and I refused to work from Thursday to Sunday because I didn't want to come in and see who didn't make it. I use to block the puppy room and say i was cleaning it and then direct the people to the dogs. I tried.
Thanks for the nice comments. I have a huge amount of neat pictures, so I may end up posting a few every post......I still want to make a book or website or SOMETHING someday. Just can't decide what.
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