On my gravestone, along with the usual name and dates, will be the phrase, “You can’t help pets without helping people.” I have said it so many times and in so many contexts that it has become my personal tagline. I say it in staff trainings, when talking to supporters about our programs and every time someone says, “I like animals more than people” as a reason they want to work at an animal shelter. Many people who don’t know a great deal about animal sheltering assume we spend most of our time with the animals, and while for some roles that is true, working with humans is a huge part of our work. On the other end of every phone call, every email and attached to every pet who needs our help is a person.
Pets have a lot of parallels with children. They are frequently powerless to determine their circumstances or change their lives. Their situations are decided by the adult humans who care for them. They don’t get to decide with whom they live, what they eat, where they sleep, when they get medical care. Working with people is essential to helping pets, and we do it in a variety of ways here at Midcoast Humane from troubleshooting behavior issues and helping find training resources, to offering low-cost vaccines and spay-neuter for those who cannot otherwise afford them, to answering a million and one possible questions pet guardians may have during the adoption process and beyond.
One of the hardest things in sheltering is teaching new staff how to recognize when they are judging someone and how to put that judgment aside. It is very easy for us to say what we would or wouldn’t do in a situation, but humans are not all the same in how we handle things, and until you are in a situation, you can’t say for certain what you would do. Would I adopt a cat with diabetes? Yes, I have had diabetic cats before and could do so again, but I absolutely understand why it may be too much of a financial and daily commitment for someone to take on. Would I bring my dog to the shelter for chewing the wall? No, I wouldn’t. Daphne, my wall-eating dog, still lives with me, but I can’t say I would blame someone for being exhausted with it. Would I wait four days before calling the shelter to report my cat lost? No, I’m a hysterical mom, the shelter would have heard from me within 10 minutes, but not everyone is the same way. In all of these situations, there is a human being that we need to talk to, work with and provide help to in order to suss out how we can best help the pet involved.
I have held people after putting their pets to sleep as they mourned, listened to thousands of stories of people’s pet’s quirks lovingly recounted, talked people through the plethora of issues that arise with living with pets, counseled thousands of pet guardians through surrendering to the shelter, and I know that their pets will never know about any of it. But I also know that I helped those animals, all of them, by helping people and I know that we are an animal shelter, but the core of what we do is provide a service to the humans of our community.
Jess Townsend is executive director of Midcoast Humane.
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