"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.