Puppies and Loveeee

[ SIDE NOTE: Let's use the poop canisters (see above), y'all. Let's not contribute to the piles of feces from factory farming that has already engulfed the planet. ]

I went to the Denton Humane Society for my volunteer work, a place where people bring in animals that have been either found or want to be given up by their owners. Places like this can be found all over the world, and all of them are equally as upsetting as the next. It’s wonderful that there are good Samaritans in the world that are willing to give up their valuable time and effort in order to help these abandoned animals when no one else will. When I volunteered, I did all of the basic tasks the first day: cleaning out of the cages, feeding and cleaning the animals. There were some seasoned volunteers who were in charge of minor treatments for some of the animals that had been injured prior to coming to the shelter. My objective going there was mostly just to help out any way that I could. I am a huge animal lover, and seeing animals suffering is unbearable to me, so whether or not I learned anything new or did anything exciting, I was just happy to go to help. One of the women I talked to said that she had been volunteering every week for almost a decade, and since all of her kids had gone off to college she said that she had found a sense of peace coming to the shelter to help the animals. I think we forget sometimes that dogs and cats are products of human creations -we bred them to be our companions - and by throwing them away, we take away all sense of self-worth from the animals.

There was a Pitbull in particular that absolutely broke my heart. He had cuts all over his face and neck, and it was obvious that his previous owner had been attempting to use him as a fighting machine. The very idea of using as an animal simply for monetary gain by the owner is a sad example of anthropocentrism, something that occurs on a daily basis. The fact that animal shelters of this magnitude exist in the first place only reinforces the idea that humans homogenize pets and regard them – dogs, cats, and other animals – simply as property, and once they are no longer interesting they can be discarded just like any other object. It is terrible and heartbreaking, especially when you see the effects of this worldview: dogs with such sad, sad eyes pleading you to be set free from behind those dirty rusty bars. Some dogs, particularly the ones that have been there for a long time, simply look at you, and when I saw a shepherd like that, it struck me for a moment almost like déjà vu. As Berger illustrated, animals have a very different type of gaze than humans, and looking into that dog’s eyes almost made me think of something feral – a creature that was once wild and in its prime but whose fire has now dulled to a soft flickering coal, barely gleaming in its bed of ashes.

Volunteering at the animal shelter made me think a lot about the Leopold readings, and in particular: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.” This really stood out to me for some reason; it reminded me of a woman I saw just as I was leaving the shelter. She had a baby raccoon in her arms, and they were in the midst of transporting it back to her house. She told me that she rescues injured animals that she finds or that people give her, and she nurses them back to health before releasing them back into the wild. To me, this is a prime example of preserving the integrity of mankind by attempting to fix the damage we humans have caused by plaguing the earth with our filth and mess. We build and excavate and tear down whole forests with no regard to the creatures whose home is that tree you just ripped down.

I originally considered my volunteer work to just be the cleaning aspect of it, but after I left the first day I felt like I hadn't done enough. So I went back, and they allowed me to walk some of the dogs are a nearby field when I came back the next day, but not all since some of the dogs were a bit to riled up to be handled by strangers outside of their kennels. This is understandable… being kept caged up in a strange place and being handled by strange people. My favorite was the retriever mutt whose picture you will find above; he was by far the sweetest, but it was obvious that his previous owners had neglected him. He was so incredibly shy the first time I tried to interact with him, but as soon as he deemed me safe, a bond formed and it nearly broke my heart to leave the place. The idea of ecological consciousness, that “we can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, and love” was definitely demonstrated during my time volunteering. I was fully aware of animal shelters before, but the suffering of these animals never really hit me until I actually spent time there. I am definitely glad that I was given the opportunity to participate in helping out my community and the animals in it.