Starky the Dying Cat

I get a call from the Animal Control Officer. Turns out that the dying cat that had come in several days earlier DOES have an owner. And she does want him back. I talk to the owner for quite some time about his overall condition, the fact that he's not eating anything anymore, not pooping, and I keep pulling a large slimy blood clot out of his mouth. She knows, she's had him into the vet several times, she knows there's something wrong with his mouth because of the rotting smell, but the vet says he's fine. Had him in just a month ago as a matter of fact. Well, our vet was in yesterday and given everything, the dignified thing to do is to put him to sleep. I told her that I thought that the best thing to do is for her to take him home, give him a good, comfortable day or to at home with his family, and plan on putting him to sleep before the end of the week. She agreed. Little while later her husband came along to collect him, and I waived the boarding fees since I know how much it costs to euthanize an animal, and they are elderly. Told him he could donate some food or litter sometime to help us out. Told the ACO to call the convent where he was found and leave a message for the nun that found the cat and had come in daily to visit him that the cat got to go home after all, and die in comfort and dignity. Was feeling pretty damn good about the whole thing.

Couple hours later, a lady comes in kinda upset looking. "I found this cat crouched in the middle of the street, cars were driving around him, but he looks nearly dead. I think he's been hit!" She holds the carrier up to the window. "!!!!!" I say wordlessly. "Where exactly did you pick this cat up?" Yup, you guessed it. Just up the street from the convent.

So apparently "Take your cat home, give him good love and comfort for a day or two, then do the dignified thing" translates in old-person-speak as "take him back home, turn him loose in the yard, and let him wander off to die slowly on his own or get hit by a car."

Cats have sharp pointy teeth, and teenagers need discipline.

The other day, I looked out the window at work and there was a Beagle tied to a fence post near the front door. Figured it was somebody who walked up with their dog and came inside to see our animals, so didn't think too much about it. An hour later, noticed the dog was still there. Walked around a bit asking people if they had a Beagle outside. No takers. Finally we brought it in. So in short, somebody abandoned a dog outside the shelter while we were OPEN. I don't get that. So, middle aged, plump, neutered male beagle. Any takers?

I got bit. An older cat Griz, whom we are treating for a UTI, got very angry at me for cleaning her cage. She sunk all her teeth and claws into my hand clear to the gumline. I said "ouch," and went and cleaned my wounds with hydrogen peroxide, as we always do when bitten. I think she got a tendon or nerve or something, because within an hour, I had lost nearly all use of my right hand, and it hurt like a mother bear. Now we get bitten on a fairly regular basis in my line of work. We know how to clean and treat such wounds. They rarely get infected, and we certainly don't go running to the doctor for every little nip. So I went home that night and iced it. Next morning, it was hugely swollen, and I was able to squeeze pus out of the holes. Now on Tuesdays, we are short-handed at work, so I didn't get a chance to go to the doctor until after we closed. My hand was pretty red by this time. The doctor spent 10 minutes on his computer going over all the bases on such an issue, and prescribed a whole bunch of meds, and told me to stay home the next couple days. I offered to go to work, but just answer phones and do office work, not clean and handle animals. He threatened to hospitalize me. So I'm home, and I'm taking 4,000 mg of assorted antibiotics a day. 

Oh yeah. Damn near forgot the big thing. Last Friday night, our shelter was broken into. They smashed a window into our Cat Intake room. Aside from the glass mess, they stole two dogs and nearly $500 cash. The dogs taken were a 1 year old American Bulldog/Lab/Hound mix, mostly white with brown patches on his rump and head. Super sweet dog! And a 8 week old yellow mixed breed male puppy. We had only had the puppy for a few days, so he was not neutered or microchipped yet, but Patch is. He will have a 24PetWatch chip beginning with OA10.... We have fingerprints, DNA from some blood, and a shoe print (where the dumb kid stepped in Piglet's poop in the hall! Goooo Piglet!!!) We also have a couple potential suspects that the police are in the process of tracking down. Patch may have been spotted in a back yard in a neighboring small town. Also that weekend, the store in that same neighboring small town, and our town's High School were broken into. Taken from the store were beer and cigarettes, I don't know about t he school. In both cases, windows were broken to gain entry. Related? Hmmm....

Only other bad thing is obviously the perps took the dogs through the cat area, because everyone's cages were a freaking disaster the next day. Food, water, litter, everything spilled! So the cats got scared and all went popcorn, but were fine by morning.

"Stupid People" Stories.

Guy calls early in the morning to let us know that the cat trap he borrowed the day before was successful, and he now has a cat to bring in. We remind him (which I explained in DETAIL to his wife the day before) that we can only take the cat in if he is tame and friendly. We do not handle feral cats here. He says he understands. We then tell him that he can bring the cat in anytime after 1:00 pm when we are OPEN. So 10 minutes later he's at the front door. My boss, already aggravated, refuses to deal with him, so I have to. After determining that the cat is indeed tame, and a neutered male, I agree to take him in. Finally, I just can't hold my tongue any longer. "So just out of curiosity," I ask, "If you have a hole in your jeans at 8:00 in the morning, do you walk into Macy's, knowing they are closed, and demand they sell you new jeans because you need them NOW?" "Well of course not," he replies with a puzzled look on his face. "THEN WHAT MAKES US SO SPECIAL?!"

Even better, the guy that shows up in the morning and stands there reading our "CLOSED" sign for several minutes, then finally knocks on the door, opens it up a crack, and hollers in at me "Are you really closed?"

 Best one of yesterday. Young couple comes in and asks if we have any Boxers available. With a chuckle I explain to them that Boxers are a rarity in our area, most of our dogs are mixes, and if we get in anything resembling a purebred, its most likely to be Lab, Border Collie, or Aussie. They then go on to describe more fully what they are looking for. Their Boxer is very shy and submissive, and they are looking for something more aggressive to be a guard dog. Ok, fine, so I describe a couple of our dogs that while aren't agressive, they are protective, and are likely to bark and maybe even look intimidating enough to scare off intruders. "That's fine," they say. "We just want something that will mix well with our Boxer." Hmm. Mix? "So when you say 'mix' what do you mean, exactly?" "Well, breed, of course." At this point, I nearly just throw them out of the shelter by their ears.  Instead, I inform them that all dogs adopted from our shelter are fixed, we don't let anything out the door intact. Further, I said in the nicest way I could manage, that only a complete idiot would take a bitch with an undesirable temperment, and breed her to a random "aggressive" mixed breed dog with absolutely no idea what his parents were like, and expect to get "a guard dog Boxer." Besides, when it comes to temperment of puppies, I find that they generally take after their mothers.

  

And last weekend, somebody dumped the world's oldest Border Collie. And he has several large tumors on his abdomen. And he's skinny, and won't eat unless you hand feed him. Of all the things I see in my job, of all the things people do to animals, this is perhaps the thing that pisses me off the most. Your dog is your faithful companion for 10+ years, and when he needs his final act of kindness and compassion from you, his owner, his friend, his GOD, you abandon him. So then, his last few days of life are spent on as thick a comforter as we can find folded neatly on a concrete floor in a bathroom. For a few minutes several times a day, we pet him, kiss him, feed him, and talk to him, but mostly he is alone. And finally, with much anguish, we have to put him to sleep. And no matter how kind we are, and how much we try to make his last days and minutes as happy and comfortable as possible, we are still strangers. This is not why we, the shelter employees, are here. We are not here to clean up your messes, correct your mistakes, react to your irresponsible actions. We are certainly not here to to kill your pet because you don't have the balls to take him to the vet yourself.

And yet, we are here for exactly that reason. And if we weren't here, the last days and minutes would be so much worse for these animals.

I love my job, but sometimes it sucks.