If I hear those words one more time I'm likely to slap someone.
Perhaps you're one of those good Bay Area liberals that donates to every animal cause that throws a photo of a pretty kitten in your face, or gives to the large local animal organisation because after years of giving to them they are like a comfortable relative you never see but feel an odd primal connection to. Perhaps it's that dog with the droopy, almost tear filled eyes peering out through the kennel bars in an animal shelter in a state aross the country and you grab your credit card and donate. Perhaps every time you read the words 'rescued from a high kill shelter', or 'about to be euthanised' or 'on his last day' you feel that wrenching sting in your gut you reach for your smartphone and 'share' on your Facebook page. And maybe you go a step further and volunteer at your local shelter, knowing that any one of the dogs or cats you have given your valuable time to, might be dead tomorrow. If you do any of the above, you are a damn good person.
You see an old dog on the concrete floor in a shelter, barely able to walk, with cataracts and fur falling in clumps out of her aged body and you feel inflamed. How could ANYONE DO SUCH A THING you wonder aloud, and your fellow volunteers nod in agreement. 'Dumped in the night kennel', someone says and you feel the heat of indignation rising. The numbers of sick, injured and old dogs and cats arriving in the shelters is rising and it feels lousy. I get it. I'm with you. In your mind you create the backstory. All the dog ever did was love their owner and THIS is how they are repaid, by being abandoned in the twilight of their lives without any information in an after hours Drop Box. And because the animal has entered the shelter they have to undergo a 'stray hold' which can vary from shelter to shelter but depending on the day of the week the animal came in, can be up to 10 days. And then, on the appointed day, unless one of the amazing 'rescue groups' has stepped up to take the broken pet into their system, the animal will be taken into a room where a life ending cocktail will enter her veins, and, out of the presence of an owner or guardian, the dog will die in the company of strangers. Sometimes it is a more gentle end than others.
If they can't afford to kill their pet, they shouldn't have one.
A couple of pups, drooling, thin, lethargic and oozing blood from their rear ends sit in a plasic laundry basket while the man who has found them, staggering on the sidewalk at one of Berkeley's busiest intersections, in one of Berkeley's more vulnerable neighbourhoods, enters the shelter to tell staff he has them in his car. The symptoms are damn obvious but without a test for parvo virus there is a faint chance it could be a combination of other debilitating conditions - worms, de-hydration, starvation perhaps. The staff member with latex gloves takes the swab from the anus and in ten minutes the confirmation. A strong positive for one of the nastiest viruses affecting dogs. It attacks the intestine and bone marrow and untreated will almost certainly result in an unpleasant and assaultive death. Even treatment is no certain cure. And just as bad, there is the possibility that the infected pups have been shedding virus which is so resilient it can live up to 9 months or more in soil and can be carried on the soles of shoes from one place to another and infect another set of pups. The two pups in the plastic bin are euthanised right there in the car of a good samaritan whose car is now covered in contagious blood.
If they can't even afford vaccinations for their pups, they shouldn't have them.
The phone rings with a call from a woman in Richmond, a city which has far greater probems than pet overpopulation, in a county which has one of the highest rates of foreclosed homes in California. Richmond sits just two small cities north of Berkeley, and is even closer to genteel Albany, where the schools are rated among the best in the region, and the streets of well groomed cottages and mid size homes are among the most sought after for Silicon Valley workers who can't afford San Francisco prices. The woman has a chihuahua, in fact as it turns out later, she has four chihuahuas, and one of them has given birth and is sick and the puppies are dying, and one more is pregnant, both by the one male in the house who is related to both of them. She is overwhelmed and regretful. She did not realise that dogs do not control their reproductive urges the way humans do (or can). How many times have I explained that canine brothers and sisters or mothers and sons will mate, and been met with an almost unbelieving stare.
If they can't afford to spay or neuter their pet they shouldn't have one.
In fairness to those who make those comments, they are the some of the same people who say similar things about people having children. As if there was something original or clever about suggesting that that there should be a good citizen testing station where prospective parents go to take their roadworthiness exam. But one of the most insidious suggestions made is that money is in indicator of the ability to be a good parent - to a child or to a domestic animal companion.
If they can't afford to get their dog to a vet, how can they afford to have puppies?
Yeah, money makes it easier. I can attest to that. I most certainly was not born into poverty or into a home of suffering. And while we did not have much, I don't ever remember a day when we did not eat, or when I did not sleep in a bed. Except by choice. There were years, after my parents divorce when my mum and I lived horribly close to the edge. And mealtimes were a repetition of beans on toast, or pizza dough out of a packet with some tomato sauce smeared on it. I found some carpet remnants at the back of a carpet store in town, and nailed them to the floor of our rented flat to keep the wood plank floor warm. But I went to decent schools (or I should say I went on occasion), my mum went without in order to buy curtains for my room, and I always knew inately that the middle class core of my family would win out over the temporary veneer of under-funded fallen on hard times divorcee and kid.
And we always had cats. Who ate before we did. And when one of them leapt onto the windowsill of our third story apartment and fell right through an open window and into the flower beds below, she was not taken to a vet, which would have completely out of our reach, but was placed in a box with a soft blanket and a bowl of warm milk, and we hoped for the best. 24 hours later, she hopped out of the cardboard box and came, purring deeply, into the living room where we were watching the telly with dinner on our laps in front of the blazing gas fire (which was coin operated), and jumped up and nuzzled into my armpit. Then in an instant she grabbed my toast and sardines. What my beloved cat did not survive was my mother sending me back to my father in one of the stealth moves she made when money worries and anger towards him precipitated a sudden change of scenery. One morning, a woman arrived and asked me to put my cat into a cage she gave me, and she walked out of the door with her. That moment was a defining one for me. I would never abandon an animal again.
We never fixed our animals. Did I already tell you that? Judy, our very first dog, had pups 2 or three times and we gave them to friends at school. My mother flushed down the loo the ones that seemed weak or were born struggling. I wasn't in the room. Kittens seemed to be running around all the time. And our preferred method of birth control was to get the hose turned on quickly when Judy, in heat, was being mounted by every Tom Dick and Harry in the Guillemard Valley Road neigbourhood of Kuala Lumpur, where a lot of the Europeans lived. 'Mummy, get the hose' became a familiar cry during those inexplicable times when Judy was crying in anguish and behaving strangely for two weeks. Sex Ed in our house.
If they won't spay or neuter their pet, they shouldn't be allowed to have one.
I didn't even know about spay or neuter surgery until I was in my late twenties in London when I took my cat Clara to the PDSA (People's Dispensary For Sick Animals) for the first of many UTI's, the first clues to the kidney failure to which she would eventually succumb. But by then, I had moved to San Francisco and Clara was living happily with my former roommate Sibyl.
And then it began. There was the small red pit pup chained in a yard next to our Bernal Heights building and I would watch her for hours crying for some attention, and receiving none, until one day I saw she was no longer on the chain and ran around the corner to knock on the offending door in case something terrible had happened, and there she was, loose and unattended on the street. Before I knew what I was doing she was in my arms, and in short order Rosa was into the home she lived in and was adored in until her death well over a decade later.
Given my reputation as someone who 'doesn't like' pitbulls (not my words) it might come as a surprise to people that my first dog rescue in America, in 1989, was a pit, and actually, so was my second. Driving along 3rd St in Bayview Hunters Point a black and white dog shot into the roadway in front of us, and stopped. I opened the passenger door and she leapt in. I took her to San Francisco Animal Control, where I learned a useful lesson. I brought her in and said 'I found this pitbull running loose'. They responded 'That's not a pitbull, it's a lab'. This started a five minute debate during which I insisted that this was indeed a pitbull and I knew the difference. It was then that one of the officers came around to the other side of the counter and gave me the unvarnished truth. 'Yes, of course it's a pitbull. If it comes in here, defined as a pitbull, it will get put to sleep. Call it a lab and it might have a chance at survival'. I thanked him and left. Little, as the dog was named died 16 years later, as beloved an animal as any animal could be, in the home of Julie, the sister of my then partner Susie.
There were the sick and dying cats and kittens in the yard directly behind ours, and the vet who shall remain nameless but is one of my great heroes, who came to the house and helped me trap them and literally neutered the boys on a kitchen table and took the females to the SPCA for spay and the kittens for adoption.
These are the formative and transformative moments in the life of an activist. Until there is education and information there can be no real understanding of an issue. Until there are obvious and available and accessible services there can be no solutions to problems of this kind.
Spay/Neuter should not be something out of economic reach. It is life saving. Vaccinations against deadly diseases are a social necessity. Euthanasia to end the suffering of a beloved but desperately ill or injured companion animal is not a luxury item. It is our compassionate obligation.
FREE PET VACCINES / FREE SPAY & NEUTER / FREE HUMANE EUTHANASIA FOR PETS
Just don't get me started on men who say 'I wouldn't cut my own balls off, why would I do that to my dog?'
Comments