Tuesday, June 16, 2009 , late evening

Saying goodbye to my best canine pal

This is a long story but for now, you just get the short version.  This evening we had Eli, our German Shepherd, put to sleep.  She was 13 years old, and we found out she was suffering from an aortic tumor and congestive heart failure.  Parts of her heart weren’t beating normally… if you know about a normal heart rhythm, and how it starts with a P wave, Eli’s heart was having multiple beats where it never got past PQ.  It wasn’t something we could fix with drugs, and she was destined to die in no more than a couple of weeks, and I didn’t want to prolong her suffering.  I always thought of her as my best friend, as the dog who understood my moods and who stuck by me when I was sad or upset.  I’d always hoped she would make it to her 14th birthday, but I’m glad I had as long as I did with her.  I’m also glad her suffering was minimal, and her death was peaceful.  I still clearly remember how she chose me… I went to look at a litter of GSD puppies, and while her siblings ran around and played, she came and sat quietly between my feet.  She did a good job picking, because I was lucky to have had such an amazing dog.

If I sound calm, I’m not… I’m utterly distraught yet highly medicated.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 06/16 at 10:22 PM
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Kevin Goes Home

Saying_bon_voyage_to_Kevin

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 06/16 at 05:55 AM
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Sunday, June 14, 2009 , lunch time

Off to CoffeeFest!

Flippy and I are rushing off to attend our second-favourite convention of all time, CoffeeFest!  It’s a shame neither of us can drink caffeine, because that’s the one limitation on a day of endless samples of exotic coffee beans, frappes, fruit smoothies, biscotti, chocolate, and all the other yummy things you’d find in a coffee shop (or on a dessert tray… mmmm, cheesecake).  Most vendors have decaf samples of their coffee products, and I need to stick to those or I’ll get so agitated my head will pop off.  I’m especially looking forward to the Lollicup booth, where I’ll get to try their newest flavours of bubble tea.

Our other task for the day is to collect donations for Wee Paws.  On the last day of a convention, many vendors (especially those with perishable or liquid items) don’t want to ship them home, so they give them away.  I find they’re always quite receptive to making donations to local charities, so I hope we’ll come home with some good coffee beans and other goodies to put up on eBay.  We may not be able to drink caffeine, but you caffeine addicts know you won’t be able to resist, so I’ll keep you posted if we get anything you’ll want to try.  See you in a few hours!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 06/14 at 12:08 PM
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Saturday, June 13, 2009 , late morning

Police Officer Saves Baby Ducks

Sorry for the lack of updates over the last few days.  My old bad habits of not posting aren’t coming back, it’s just been a busy, busy, busy week!  Eli has also been sick after eating a cat toy on Wednesday, although today seems to be well on the mend and eating again.  That’s good, because we spent 3 hours at the vet on Thursdays getting Kevin/Cody ready for his adoption on Monday, and the thought of going back to the vet today is just too tiring to contemplate.  While at the clinic with Kevin/Cody, I had the chance to feed five week-old orphaned kittens…. SO CUTE!  There were three tabbies with white splotches and pink noses, and two which were black and white with pink noses.  I also got to clean up one with the runs, wheeee!  Oh, we will be bringing home those two, 4 year old cats who lost their elderly owner last week.  I met the cats on Thursday and they’re adorable, terrified, and not eating, so I think they’ll do a lot better if we bring them into a normal home environment.  Their owner left them tons of food, toys, cat trees, etc., so they were definitely well-loved.  They’re so sweet and unique-looking that I think they’ll get snapped up via Petfinder quite quickly.  I’ll post photos of them when we get them (and after I’ve recovered from getting Cody-Kev (we’re trying to break him in to his new name) to the airport on Monday.

While you wait for new cat pics, enjoy this slideshow of a police officer helping a duck damsel in distress:  Cop Rescues Ducklings

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 06/13 at 11:39 AM
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Tuesday, June 09, 2009 , late evening

Green with Envy

Now this is my idea of a good time:

I mentioned earlier today that we might get two foster kitties.  We thought they’d be arriving today, but the vet’s office is keeping them for a few days because they think they have a client who might be interested in adopting them.  They’re 4 year old Siamese-mix siblings, who were surrendered by an elderly man who’s in poor health and unable to care for them any longer.  The man’s wife just passed away, and perhaps she was the one who took care of the cats, so now the cats needed to find a new place to live.  We’d be quite happy to take them—in fact, we were kind of excited about it—but we have to wait a few days to see how it pans out.  It would be best for the cats to be adopted, of course.  Our current foster cat, Kevin aka Cody is hopefully going to his new home in Seattle on Monday, so we’ll be down one cat and the house will feel practically empty!!!  Seriously, Kevin is a sweet, chatty guy, and I’ll be sad to see him go, but he’s going to the most amazing owners and he’s one incredibly lucky cat.  He went from living in a feral colony at our local bird sanctuary to living in an old car in our neighbour’s yard to living in our laundry room to being flown on an airplane to a fabulous home in the Pacific Northwest.  His adopters plan to install cat fencing for him, so he’ll be able to indulge his love of the outdoors without leaving the yard.  I posted on Craigslist and found a nice woman from Seattle who’s visiting this weekend for a reunion of her military unit, and she offered to take Kevin back on the plane with her.  It saves me a trip (I was going to go up and back on the same day), and it saves the adopters a ton of money.

I had another offer to move Kevin to Seattle, but this person was driving up from Arizona, and I didn’t want Kevin to have to spend so much time crated in a car.  I was also afraid he’d yell the entire way and drive everyone crazy.  The driver was a professional mover, and he and his wife move antique cars, boats, etc. all over the country.  While making these moves, they also try to deliver rescued animals to their new homes, which is amazing, because they move the animals for free.  I found out about free pet moving for charity by using a service called uShip.com, and I’d definitely use the service again.  The movers are generally experienced and user ratings are provided.  There’s a specific section for pets from charities.  Pet breeders also move animals using this service, although then it isn’t free.  It’s great to know there are so many options starting to become available to move pets, because in the next few months we might need to employ them.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 06/09 at 10:39 PM
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Inappropriate feline urination

Isn’t that a magnificent title for an icky problem?!  Go check out this blog entry, If your pee pee hurts, what would you do? at Tails From A Cat Vet, to get insight on how to resolve the unpleasant situation.  As a bonus, the blog entry is even kind of amusing.

psst!  I think we’re getting two new foster cats.  News to come later today!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 06/09 at 11:49 AM
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Economic Euthanasia

I recently read two good magazine articles about the rise of “economic euthanasia” during the country’s current financial crisis.  Economic euthanasia is the term used when an owner chooses not to treat their sick (and curable) pet for financial reasons, and it also refers to people who choose to have their pets euthanized because they can no longer afford to take care of them.  It’s not surprising that this depressing procedure is happening more and more often, but what was encouraging about the article was that many people are instinctively taking action to help stop it.  Dr. Patty Khuly, who writes the blog Doolittler, is quoted in the article as saying her animal hospital has seen a big upswing in the number of donations made by clients to help other clients and pets in need.  The article also mentions that the animal retirement and pet hospice movement continues to grow, and that’s encouraging.  If you’d like to read the article, you can find it in last month’s issue of Veterinary Practice News.  I’m afraid I can’t link to the second article I read, which is in the current issue of VPN, because it isn’t online yet.  However, you might be interested in reading about the increasing popularity of palliative and Pawspice services.  As someone who specifically tries to adopt elderly/senior animals, I like knowing there are options available for me to care for the animals at home towards the end of their lives.

One disagreement I have with the first article is the author’s claim that vet clinics should reject convenience euthanasia, and should direct the pet owner to use their community’s shelter services.  I’d hate to think the author was advocating that the owner surrender their unwanted pets to an overcrowded shelter system, where the pet is likely to be euthanized, but only after a few days of terror in a place full of strange smells and noises.  I can understand the unwillingness to perform these euthanasia services in the vet clinic, but if you’re advocating for the animal, it seems you’d want it to be as comfortable as possible.  This seems especially important if the animal is older or a large mixed breed—animals generally considered “unadoptable”.  I don’t know how I’d handle the situation if was a vet in my own clinic, though, so I don’t want to be really black/white about the issue… it’s difficult.  The animal hospital we go to doesn’t perform convenience or economic euthanasia, but asks the pet owner to surrender their animal so it can be rehomed.  That’s how we ended up with quite a few of our cats, and also why so many of the clinic staff have so many animals (one vet tech has 20 cats, as well as a few kids… busy woman!).

One last point to take away from the first article I posted:  your tax dollars pay whenever someone decides to drop their pet off at the city animal shelter.  Your tax dollars aren’t involved in the operation of private rescue and sanctuary facilities in the slightest (unless you choose to make a donation), but you’re automatically contributing to local animal control via your property taxes.  If you’re concerned about your taxes rising, be concerned about people who aren’t caring for their pets properly, because those are the people who are using up the local shelter’s budget and forcing taxes to increase.  There’s a oft’ quoted statement about the penal system, which says that it costs more to execute a person than it does to keep them in prison for life.  That applies to animal care as well—it costs more for animal control to euthanize a pet than it does for them to keep the animal alive and offer it for adoption.  No-kill shelters can actually be less expensive to run than kill shelters, when properly administered, but that’s a topic for another time.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 06/09 at 02:16 AM
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Saturday, June 06, 2009 , early evening

Who’s a cutie-wootie-sweetie-snoogums-pie?

Esme, that’s who.  Go say hi to Helly and Alan’s teeny new furbaby!

On a related note, we almost ended up with a new furkid of our own yesterday because Flippy left me unsupervised on the Best Friends website.  That led to me seeing an announcement about an 8 month old Anatolian shepherd in a kill-shelter in Texas, so I wrote and offered to foster if the rescue group could get the dog here.  They could, but had already found a foster home for the dog.  Whew!  Dante almost had a 100 lb. baby sister.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 06/06 at 06:38 PM
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Friday, June 05, 2009 , late morning

All animal rescue workers get a little crazy

I almost feel silly calling myself an “animal rescue worker”, because I know I only deal with the public and pet relinquishment situations a few times a month.  The poor people who do this for a living deal with relinquishment dozens of times a day, but then, some of them get paid.  Not enough, I’m sure, but maybe it’s some cold comfort.  I guess we must all feel the same emotions because I really identified with this fictitious letter that Flippy found while browsing a site for rat rescue.  Even the rat rescuers are fed up!  I liked the concept of this letter so much that I’ve been threatening to use a version of it as a autoresponder, and truth be told, I wrote something kind of like it a few hours ago.  Someone wrote to me to try to rehome a cat, and it’s a situation where the cat doesn’t need rehoming, the owners just need to suck it up.  But they don’t want to… no one ever wants to be inconvenienced (just the cat can be inconvenienced).  Anyway, I hope some of you will enjoy the spirit in which this letter was written:

———————————————————
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Pet Owner:

Thank you for contacting us animal rescuers, and foster-homes about your inability to keep your pet. We receive an extremely high volume of inquiries and requests to accept surrendered animals (and none of us is getting paid, OK?). To help us expedite your problem as quickly as possible, please observe the following guidelines:

1. Do not say that you are “CONSIDERING finding a good home” for your pet, or that you, “feel you MIGHT be forced to,” or that you “really THINK it would be better if” you unloaded the poor beast. Ninety-five percent of you have already got your minds stone-cold made up that the animal WILL be out of your life by the weekend at the latest. Say so. If you don’t, I’m going to waste a lot of time giving you common-sense, easy solutions for very fixable problems, and you’re going to waste a lot of time coming up with fanciful reasons why the solution couldn’t possibly work for you.  For instance, you say the cat claws the furniture, and I tell you about nail-clipping and scratching posts and aversion training, and then you go into a long harangue about how your husband won’t let you put a scratching post in the family room, and your daughter cries if you use a squirt bottle on the cat, and your congenital thumb abnormalities prevent you from using nail scissors and etc, etc. Just say you’re getting rid of the cat.

2. Do not waste time trying to convince me how nice and humane you are. Your coworker recommended that you contact me because I am nice to animals, not because I am nice to people, and I don’t like people who “get rid of” their animals. “Get rid of” is my least favorite phrase in any language. I hope someone “gets rid of” YOU someday. I am an animal advocate, not a people therapist.  After all, for your daughter, you can get counselors, special teachers, doctors, social workers, etc. Your pet has only me, and people like me, to turn to in his or her need, and we are unpaid, overworked, stressed-out, and demoralized. So don’t tell me this big long story about how, “We love this dog so much, and we even bought him a special bed that cost $50, and it is just KILLING us to part with him, but honestly, our maid is just awash in dog hair every time she cleans, and his breath sometimes just reeks of liver, so you can see how hard we’ve tried, and how dear he is to us, but we really just can’t . .”  You are not nice, and it is not killing you. It is, in all probability, literally killing your dog, but you’re going to be just fine once the beast is out of your sight. Don’t waste my time trying to make me like you or feel sorry for you in your plight.

3. Do not try to convince me that your pet is exceptional and deserves special treatment. I don’t care if you taught him to sit. I have a waiting list of battered and/or whacked-out animals who need help, and I have no room to foster-house your pet. Do not send me long messages detailing how Fido just l-o-v-e-s blankies and carries his favorite blankie everywhere, and oh, when he gets all excited and happy, he spins around in circles, isn’t that cute? He really is darling, so it wouldn’t be any trouble at all for us to find him a good home.  Listen, we can go down to the shelter and count the darling, spinning, blankie-loving beasts on death row by the dozens, any day of the week. And, honey, Fido is a six-year-old Shepherd-Lab mix. I am not lying when I tell you that big, older, mixed-breed, garden-variety dogs are almost completely unadoptable, and I don’t care if they can whistle Dixie or send smoke signals with their blankies.  What you don’t realize is that, though you’re trying to lie to me, you’re actually telling the truth: your pet is a special, wonderful, amazing creature. But this mean old world does not care. More importantly, YOU do not care, and I can’t fix that problem. All I can do is grieve for all the exceptional animals who live short, brutal, loveless lives and die without anyone ever recognizing that they were indeed very, very special.

4. Finally, just, for God’s sake, for the animal’s sake, tell the truth, and the whole truth. Do you think that if you just mumble that your dog is “high-strung,” I will say, “Okey-doke! No prob!” and take it into foster care?  No, I will start asking questions and uncover the truth, which is that your dog has not peed outside in the last six months. Do not tell me that you “can’t” crate your dog. I will ask what happens when you try to crate him, and you will either be forced to tell me the symptoms of full-blown, severe separation anxiety, or else you will resort to lying some more, wasting more of our time.  If you succeed in placing your pet in a shelter, do not tell yourself the biggest lie of all: “Those nice people will take him and find him a good home, and everything will be fine.”  Those nice people will indeed give the animal every possible chance, but if they discover serious health or behavior problems, if they find that your misguided attempts to train or discipline him have driven him over the edge they will do what you are too immoral and cowardly to do: They will hold the animal in their arms, telling him truthfully that he is a good dog, telling him truthfully that they are sorry and they love him, while the vet ends his life.  Why not just tell it like it is:

“We went to Wal-Mart and picked up a free pet in the parking lot a couple of years ago. Now we don’t want it anymore. We’re lazier than we thought. We’ve got no patience either. We’re starting to suspect the animal is really smarter than we are, which is giving us self-esteem issues. Clearly, we can’t possibly keep it. Plus, it might be getting sick; it’s acting kind of funny.

“We would like you to take it in eagerly, enthusiastically, and immediately. We hope you’ll realize what a deal you’re getting and not ask us for a donation to help defray your costs. After all, this is an (almost) purebred animal, and we’ll send the leftover food along with it. We get it at Wal-Mart too, and boy, it’s a really good deal, price-wise.

“We are very irritated that you haven’t shown pity on us in our great need and picked the animal up already. We thought you people were supposed to be humane! Come and get it today. No, we couldn’t possibly bring it to you; the final episode of ‘Survivor’ is on tonight.”

Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Pet Owner, for your cooperation.  And kindly remember our sympathy is with the dog, not you.

Author Unknown
———————————————————

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 06/05 at 11:30 AM
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Thursday, June 04, 2009 , lunch time

A free and easy way to support Wee Paws: GoodSearch.com

Here’s a free and painless way to support Wee Paws every time you search the Internet! Go to GoodSearch.com and select Wee Paws Animal Sanctuary as your charity of choice, then install their toolbar or search box (or search via their website). Wee Paws gets a few cents for every Internet search you do, and in the course of a year, it can add up to quite a lot! Last year we had one person using the GoodSearch feature and we received $25 as a result of her efforts, so it’s a great way to help out while not really altering your Internet routine.  The toolbar is absolutely safe and spyware-free, and is a simplified version of the Yahoo toolbar.  If you don’t want to install the entire toolbar, you can just add Goodsearch as an option in the small “search box” available at the top of most browsers, and if you don’t want to make any changes to your browser, you can set GoodSearch.com as your homepage and do your searches from there.  As long as you allow GoodSearch to set a cookie so it can remember you’ve chosen Wee Paws as the charity you’re supporting, you won’t have to do anything but search as you would normally.

You can of course decide to use GoodSearch to support any of the other thousands of charities they have listed—they seem to work with everyone from the largest charities to the smallest.  The only thing I’ll say about Wee Paws is that I absolutely, positively guarantee that every penny you donate to us (via any means) goes to pay for the care of the animals.  When I receive a donation I either use it to buy something the animals need, or I set it aside for later use… we’ve never used a penny of a donation on ourselves.  Every time we foster a cat or bring in another stray off the streets, it’s because you’ve given us the money to do it.  There are times the Wee Paws critters are eating better than the Wee Paws humans, but that’s because I want to ensure we develop a reputation for using our donations properly.  We’ve put a moratorium on taking in any more permanent residents until we figure out our living arrangements, but once that’s settled, I plan to hunker down and try to expand Wee Paws by a few cats every year.  I especially want to be able to start to work with senior citizens, to see about arranging to take in cats when people are hospitalized or pass away.  Besides caring for bottle-babies, I think that will end up being our future—some hospice-type care for chronically ill and elderly felines, and a retirement home for cats who lose their owners to old age.  I hate it when senior citizens avoid getting pets for fear they’ll outlive the animal, so maybe we can step in and help.  Oh, I want to offer more long-term care for the pets of families in transition—for example, caring for the cat of someone in the military who is deployed overseas, or looking after cats while families are between homes (like we did with Buddy and Wilbur).  There are so many ways to help, and the more support we get from the general public, the more we can get done. 

If you feel so inclined, would you pass on word about GoodSearch to your friends if you have a blog?  Again, it doesn’t matter what charity they decide to support, but the application deserves to be promoted and used by more people.  Also, a big thank you to our friend Helena at Living and Dying in 3/4 Time, who told me about GoodSearch at least a year ago, but I neglected to post about it.  Thank you, Helena, and thank you for the $25 you earned for us last year!

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 06/04 at 12:08 PM
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