A Day in the Life of Our Pets

By isak, July 24, 2009

It’s Friday, July 24, 2009. A year ago on this date — it was a Thursday — Animal Control came to Francesca Rogier’s door in Halifax, Nova Scotia and seized her dog, Brindi, for a scuffle that occurred in front of her house a few days before. Best guess, that was about 8,778 hours ago or at least 31,602,389 seconds ago. So what do we do? Do we mark it as an anniversary? Or do we mark it as a failure because her impoundment has gone on for so long?

In any given day, emails, tweets, Facebook entries and websites flash the faces of animals that will be killed in shelters unless a rescue or adoption saves their lives. Some are owner-surrendered, some are strays found wandering, some are seized, but most are given a very short opportunity at life. I read where a police officer found a five-week old kitten. He did not want to turn it in to the shelter because its young age meant a quick death; no chance at life. So he found a rescue group to take in the kitten.

Urgently, there are angels using the power of the internet to connect with possibilities to save these lives — a woman in Philly knows a man in Los Angeles who knows a rescue group in Pasadena. They will pull a dog from death row there. And perhaps this dog will board the canine underground railroad to her forever home in Kansas City. This goes on quietly every day and into every night. Yet we still fall short of finding homes for them all.

Recently, 2 senior dogs were turned in to a high kill shelter in South Carolina. They had been surrendered by a sick, elderly man who needed to go to hospital and had no other place to take his beloved dogs. “He cried like a baby when he handed them over.” An online fundraiser has been set up to raise the necessary funds for standard vet care for these dogs — and this amount has been met. Money received above this amount will be applied to their medical fees, if needed, or donated to the rescue group. Efforts are underway to transport them to a no-kill shelter in the Northeast. You can follow their story on this webpage.

But what about the others? What about Deja who is having a very hard time adjusting to the shelter? Or Repo? Or the cats and dogs whose web links are no longer active — probably because they have been euthanized.

Today, I would like to encourage you to adopt a shelter animal. If you already have two, get another. Save a life.

And FREE Brindi! Her mom wants her back!