Last week, for the first time in my life, I dropped by an SPCA shelter.
It requires a certain amount of fortitude to walk through those doors, especially if empathy often gets the better of you. And I’m perhaps not the most fearless sort.
Oh, I have my moments. I didn’t panic the time my car stalled while crossing railroad tracks. I shrugged off a painfully shredded rotator cuff to play three more months of football and I once wrestled a live shark from the shallows of Galveston Bay and pinned it on the beach.
Of course, in the first instance the tracks were clear and I managed to restart the car and drive away at least half an hour before the next train arrived. Heavy doses of painkillers ensured my gridiron feat and the juvenile sand shark was in poor health when I reached into the water and grabbed it by the tail. It didn’t even put up a fight.
A tour of the SPCA of Clear Lake cages presents a set of challenges comparable to … well, to no other situation I can imagine. In each room dogs and cats wait — eagerly, once assumes — for that moment when someone kind whisks them to a gentle, roomy home with plenty of food. You engage them in passing, saying complimentary things in an encouraging voice, as you would with a neighbor’s pet. They mew or bark or lay there in despair.
Inside your emotions turn impossible cartwheels. You want to help, you want to load armfuls of pets into your car and head home. But firm yanks from that place where we rationalize a lack of action …
Just for the record, we have five cats and one dog in a scaled down home. On Friday, when I walked through the front door and merely announced that I had visited the shelter, I was belted by “no” a few times, followed by a skeptical “where is it?”
Oh, yeah — after looking at the hopeful pets I figured we could handle a few more paws prying open cabinets, climbing that Hugo Boss suit to reach the closet’s top shelf, figuring out clever ways to knock ripening tomatoes to the floor. Personally, I love the antics. And it never seems right to become upset at an animal for not acting human. However, given the amount of space available for the pets to find a corner to call their own and the limited food/toy/veterinarian budget afforded by a newspaper salary, we’re about maxed out.
Unfortunately, too many people ditch innocent pets because they haven’t accounted for the realities of budget or living space. Too many people become angry at a pet for understanding the world from a dog or cat perspective and behaving accordingly. And so you have the SPCA, trying to pick up the pieces, find the discarded pets a home with people worthy of them and spending all of their empathy — and then some — day after day.
I had always avoided visiting a shelter, expecting the experience might haunt me. If I could just ignore the reality or look past it, then I could rationalize any lack of action on my part: there aren’t that many animals, they enjoy it there, people adopt all the time — that sort of thing.
But for some reason I stiffened up and walked into the SPCA building. Great. Now I have to deal with what I know.
Adding to our circus may not be the wisest route for us or the pets. But the SPCA of Clear Lake and the animals it serves appreciates any little bit of help. Some people donate money. Veterinarians offer care. I think I can buy that extra bag of food or box of litter and drop it off.
It’s not much. But then my acts of bravery have never been that impressive.
