Rescue Journal

more birds eye truth

Carol  ·  Jan. 21, 2015

so the new guys...

kyah is taking a few of her many meds if we space them carefully out over the entire day and evening...one at a time in a meatball. she had her first medicated bath yesterday and the staff are still alive.

doughy and duke have finally eaten..cleopatra is much too upset and still in the midst of a hunger strike. I think today we will need to start force feeding...that sucks for both her and us. luckily duke and doughy will escape that unhappy event such a relief when the newby cats decide not to starve themselves during their initial transitional meltdowns.

here is the thing..i do not care how great of a rescue or shelter you are...animals do not want to be here. any big change is every animals worst nightmare. and for any living creature...human or animal..losing ones home and family is one of the worst nightmares of all.

wait..i take that back...there are some animals who come here and love it the second that they arrive and those are the very saddest of all animals. those are the ones coming from lives so barren, unkind and uncomfortable that even an over crowded shelter filled with wrecked ones, is the best place they have ever been and they are happy to have found us.

those guys break my heart even more.

I want to say something here...

if you lose your leg in a car accident, by being stupidly irresponsible with a chainsaw or by having it chomped off by a giant maniacal shark...in the end it really doesn't matter how or why you lost it. the leg is gone and now for the rest of your life you have to learn to deal with that loss.

we seem to think that the reasons behind what we do in life have anything to do with the actual results..ok so maybe we were innocent, or maybe we were stupid but the following legless reality will still be exactly the same and it still will be really hard.

and for those that are directly affected by whatever did happen...they have to learn to live with it and that too will be hard.

so here is my thing...

in the end it doesn't matter so much why I do something...what really matters is what came out of what I just did. for those of you who have read this blog over the years....you know of some of the horrible results that have occurred while I was really just trying to help...my intentions were great but the results were filled with pain.

am I a horrible person? absolutely not but some of my decisions and actions have in fact caused irredeemable suffering and pain. and I have learned to own it...it helps keep me from making the same mistakes over again.

you cannot be in rescue as long as I have, nor taken in the hundreds upon hundreds over the years as I do and not become somewhat hardened. not in terms of how I feel about animals and people..but in terms of how I look at the things that they both do.

so if you take for example a biter like odie who we had to walk on egg shells around. all of the sad reasons that made odie a pain in the ass...his blindness, his inborn husky hysteria and over reactivity and his personal assumption that every time his tail was stepped on...someone did it on purpose and had to be punished...those things did not matter to me...what mattered was to ensure that no one stepped on his tail. and oh my god...that poor freaking dog..his tail was like some kind of human foot magnet. but the bottom line was...odie was a biter and he bit hard and that was our reality that we had to live with....and so did odie.

I guess what I am trying to say here is we humans need to take a page out of the animals books...dogs who bite hard and repeatedly are almost always euth'd. cats who spray urine everywhere they go are unadoptable and usually also get euth'd. we may feel badly about this but the reality is..the reasons behind who they are and what they do is a moot point..they are displaying seriously unpopular behaviors and few folks are willing or able to live with them.

except us...cuz we are stupid.

so if the animals have to accept the bottom line ultimate penalty for who they are and what they do...why do we think that as humans, the reasons or excuses behind what we do make one bit of difference to the results of what we did do?

that is accepting responsibility.. we actually do have the ability to look at the reality and accept it for what it is...real. now. today. its what the animals have to do in living with us..their excuses do not get them very far. they have to live in reality. we have to stop being afraid to live in reality too...sometimes you just cannot make unhappy things, less unhappy.

this sucks but it is totally true.

Comments

Maggie

You are so right Carol--people these days want to blame everyone, and everything, else, for their mistakes, faults, failures, etc.

It's NEVER their fault or responsibility and that's their excuse for doing it again and again. Whether it's a pet owner, parent, and even children unfortunately.

One of my fav personal examples is when someone cuts me off in traffic and almost causes me to have an accident and when I blow my horn at them---they give me the finger...like I'm the one who did something wrong and they should be mad at me--unbelieveable.