Friday, August 24, 2012

Happy Kittens, Focused Mouse

Kind of serious-talk time, but I promise...it really will get uplifting.  Just read through the somber-Mouse bits first.

So very much has happened to me during these past several months that it seems strange that I've managed to find the time to do any work with animals at all, even my own.  But it turns out - it's all about perspective.

Last night (...I think it was last night?) I had a very, very long phone conversation with the woman who asked me to pick up the kittens.  She is facing despair in the truest and deepest sense, and at some point in rescuing, we all do.  It isn't just rescue, of course - it's everything, it always is - but when we hear sad story after sad story, and have our hearts broken time and time again, it can require something massive to see a silver lining.  To not want to throw your hands in the air and just walk away.  To not just...strangle some people...

We wish there was a way to put the blinders back on and unsee what we have seen.

I'm not trying to be dramatic here.  It's extremely true.  It takes a very special soul to keep going, and it takes a lot of strong friendships to support each other through the roughest of times.


About half an hour ago I heard that the kittens, who I had to put with a bottle-feeding sitter tonight so I could go to work for eight hours, have found a home.  I was kind of shocked, because I had picked those kittens up.  I had fostered them.  I had nitpicked over their care, learned which one likes to eat how, stroked their tummies when they fussed.  It hadn't been very long - but the transfer was arranged for the morning - completely without me being there at all.

OF COURSE I will get to say bye to them, and the new foster will probably even let me visit.  This is a blessing, and it had to happen.

But...I'm going to miss them.  I feel like momma.  One moment your babies are there, and you're feeding them when they cry every hour or two, and the next...they're gone.  That's ludicrous - I can't ACTUALLY compare seeing fosters move on to a mom losing her babies.  That's nothing alike at all, and my heart still breaks for the momma, somewhere in Louisiana, confused and...just...it's awful.

I KNOW they have to move on.

I just love them.

So to keep from falling into a selfish bout of depression, I did something I did at the end of 2011 - I tallied up the rescues.  In December of 2011, I counted up all the rescues, transfers, rehomings, every pet I could think of that we had helped in some way and made a photo album of them online.  I think I will start making one physically, as well, with little trinkets and memories.  I'm not really the scrapbooking type...but anyways.

The album didn't have that many pets in it, but it had been a busy year and I was still pioneering my way into my own style of guerilla, hardcore rescue.  You know the type.  No...not the nutjobs who break into labs or go batshit on someone who uses a different training style than they do.  The folks who don't sleep until the pet can.  I was still figuring that mess out, but I was so delighted about my little album of success stories.

It was part pat-on-the-back, and part encouragement.  Next year, I'll beat that.  Next year we'll have even MORE happy tails to wag.  Look at my progress - I can help animals, and I can keep on going.

So I sat down tonight and I went through my photo albums on facebook and collected everyone I could think of.  I counted the feline leukemia kittens and the colony of TNRs they came from because they weren't in the 2011 album, and I wasn't quite sure when that had happened.  Probably in late 2011.  I feel like it might have been chilly at the time.  But I am counting them anyways, because they deserve to be counted, and we have gone through so very much with them this year.

So I tallied.  And guys...

I have helped 33 animals this year...
and it's only August.

Even if you took out the feleukers and TNR, that's still 15 pets.  In 8 months.

Holy shit.

I tripled the pets I reached out to this year so far, even around working multiple jobs, losing a pregnancy, and everything else that has hit us this year.  And that isn't even counting any pets adopted out through IAF.  JUST ones that my husband and I physically and personally helped, and played an active, crucial role in.

  • One rehoming - Suka the pittie, who is now a service dog.
  • Two found animals returned - Bentley the beagle, and a Corgi with no collar.
  • TEN rescues - the four Louisiana kittens, and the six feleukers (RIP Dove and Traveler)
  • Twelve TNRs - In one massive event executed almost entirely by us and aforementioned friend
  • Eight transports - Seven dogs from Canton to local homes and fosters, and one pup with a broken jaw from San Anton to Austin.
If anything can lift your spirits when you have to say goodbye to four tiny lives you grew pretty attached to, well, looking at that big of a picture is one fuck of a help.  I have gone from volunteering where help was needed to actively rescuing, being a manager in a rescue and driving a fostering program, and just...holy shit, guys, I helped thirty-three animals survive, find where they belong, live healthy, and get to help.  In the past eight months.

And in the months after this, I am going to continue to do everything I can, give everything I can, and learn everything I can.

I have never felt more like I know who I am and why I am here than looking at this sheet of paper and remembering that I do have a purpose, and those blinders can never go back on.  I wear pants with kitten milk stains.  I don't shut my mouth about BSL.  I answer the phone when I am asleep, get out of bed, and go pick up and feed starving animals.  I quarantine a room, sanitizing everything down to changing clothes at the door, to care for kittens with a lethal disease as long as they can before it hits them.  I stop on the side of the road for dogs, no matter where I am going.  I drive across the state to take a dog off a euth list and put it in a yard and a home.  I am Mouse, and homecheck is a regular word in my vocabulary.


When in my life could I ever have thought I was meant for anything else?

-Mouse

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