The kitten was soaking wet, painfully thin and shivering, but she was feisty, purring and mewling loudly for food. The Dog Officer had brought her down from the North Shore after a good Samaritan reported finding her lying unconscious in a stream, crawling with maggots. Now, after being cleaned and warmed up, she actually looked pretty good. I gave her a quick once-over and declared a good prognosis. “Good!” the DO said, and then looking a little anxious, he added, “I hope she makes weight.”
Before I explain, you need to promise to bear in mind that this shelter takes in over 30,000 animals a year and can only adopt out around 10,000 or so. This necessitates some brutal triage. Animals are assessed for health (no problems, or problems with simple, inexpensive fixes), temperament and adoptability…and dogs and cats must weigh at least two pounds, because the resources to raise very small animals until they are large enough to be spayed or neutered and adopted out just aren’t there. The animals that don’t make the grade are “PA’d” – the staff euphemism for euthanasia.
We both had been working with animals long enough to know that there was no way this particular kitten would weigh two pounds, but we put her on the scale anyway with the irrational unspoken hope that we were wrong. She came in just over a pound. “Oh well,” he sighed, “that’s too bad.”
Thoughts ran rapid-fire through my head. Here was a perfectly healthy kitten that would be just fine if given the chance to live. If I could just foster her until she had a little time to grow…but our little house was already overwhelmed with four pets, two children and three adults, and one of the cats was elderly and terminally ill, stressed, and urinating inappropriately around the house. I knew bringing in this new family member, even temporarily, would be an undue burden and unfair to the other pets. That isn’t even to mention how many times this scenario gets repeated every single day. I sighed, too, and kept my mouth shut. Then, I walked away.
Doing good work is not always easy. My personal mandate in life is to do everything I can to reduce the suffering in the world. Everything I do must achieve that end. Sometimes this means signing off on the death of animals that technically could have been helped, if by “helped” you mean kept in a cage with inadequate care and pain control in an attempt to correct a medical problem or trauma. It boils down to money, of course. With unlimited money, land could be purchased and a huge facility built, first class medical care sought, a cadre of well-paid veterinarians recruited to perform spays and neuters in-hospital and in the field. Animals that couldn’t be adopted for whatever reason could live out their lives in comfort. Maybe the stray population problem would start to look like something we could make a dent in, instead of giving the feeling of trying to swim upstream in a raging waterfall.
Spending one day a week performing high volume spays and neuters , punctuated by making difficult and, sometimes, apparently heartless decisions is difficult work, to say the least. This is not a gig that I need. I do it for far less money than my other contracts because I feel that it is important work that needs to be done. The suffering will continue whether I choose to turn my back on it or not. I choose to look, and to do what I can, because it is my responsibility. My kuleana.
If you made it with me this far, thanks for your time, and for listening.
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