our growth rate has been remarkable in the past 4 years...we have quadrupled in actual size. we have gone from "me" to many and the acuity of our animals has grown greater too.
live and learn and life is a lifelong learning experience.
never can you stop and stagnate and think you know and do it all...that is just lazy acceptence of this is how it is....not.
shelter/sanctuary care is what we make it every single day....good, bad, great, horrible, simply ok...we choose which direction to go or if we just stay the same, day after day.
the rescues that have gone off track did not do so over night...it was an insideous creeping in of refusal to change ourselves and what we do to meet the new demands of a brand new day. the pahrump and ff cats have already made that journey into the dark...they are not ever going to make that journey again.
and so i am a freak out who freaks out if their care slips even an inch because we are busy with other things.
there are no other things of great importance here except the animals themselves...not me, not the staff, not the volunteers, not the paperwork, not the bills, not the visiting tours, not the filming crews, not the fundraisers, not how many hours there are in a day, or how heavy is the work...all of it has importance of its own but not at the expense of how we care for them personally every single day.
THEY are THE top priority...the one and only number one that we always see and feel and take care of first....all the rest is a useless waste of time and energy if we have not met our responsibility to them.
big changes in how we do things, in how we set our priorities, in the level we feel in personal responsibility are part of the whole growing process. since i let saints get too big for me, i have to make sure that all of us together are big enough for meeting saints mandate and the sainted ones needs.
i am not one to let us passively slip down to simply ok or even worse...we provide top quality care and that means we do not become complacent with how we do things.
we push higher, we push for better, we do not accept whatever inevitabilty throws at us because we cannot grow along with the growth that is happening so quickly around here.
we take in sick and elderly animals and with that comes along alot of extra care, work, and emotional/mental/physical/financial demands upon us that maybe other shelters do not have to deal with and we have got to meet those demands and exceed them or we should just close the doors and all go home.
that is how you prevent slowly sliding into a not very good rescue....growing pains hurt and they hurt continuously.....but they hurt for a reason. they hurt to fully motivate us into changing and evolving into something better than we were the day before.
and we will NEVER stay for long in "good enough"...we will keep moving towards "even better."that is our job here each day,
what time do you get home from work? maybe I can come just before then for most of it, but then I might still get to see you...we can show up anywhere between 11-4 ish