Sabbatical Over! I am BACK!

Hello again, Faithful Readers,

I can say faithful because if you’re reading this, you’ve been waiting a full 5 months for new content.  TOAC has been on sabbatical and has returned refreshed, rejuvenated and re-educated. 

During this last five months, I have submersed myself into the world of animal rescue.  Not physically if you don’t count the gut wrenching, hand twisting, tear jerking and heart breaking world that is animal rescue.  No I don’t actually go into animal shelters and pull animals, taking them to the vet, then to foster care and meanwhile, trying to find them a good forever home at the same time. Those folks are my heroes.  What I have done is join the thousands of other online networkers who spend days and nights tirelessly trying to help save the millions of homeless animals that die in shelters every year by broadcasting the call for help and coordinating the responses.  I cry usually at least once a day.  

It is a very difficult job to do, do not underestimate it.  There are literally thousands of animals across North America who are killed every day in order for the animal control shelter to make space for new intakes. By reading their stories and passing them along, by following their rescue progress, you get to know these animals and to know them is to love them.  Then, if rescue is not available, these wonderful loveable animals will be killed using various methods depending on the area of the country they found themselves in.  Gas chambers and heart sticks are used all through the North American continent really but are prevalent in the south eastern United States.  So are redneck attitudes and virtual illiterates who make life and death calls repeatedly throughout their workday.  But that’s another blog for another day.

It’s heartbreaking work and I don’t recommend it for the weak of heart or tepid resolve.

I watched a video on YouTube that showed the killing of animals in a shelter using a gas chamber.  It literally changed who I was.  You cannot listen to animals screaming in agony like that for what seems like an eternity and not be changed.  Puppies, kitties, mommies and family pets gone astray.  Tortured and killed just the way Hitler used to do it. 

I watched another video of Jeff Bass, the shelter manager at Robeson in North Carolina along with the resident vet and shelter workers use heart sticking on animals who had not been sedated in any way, simply grabbed by the scruff of the neck and jabbed with the heart stick right in the chest.  The animals scream in agony before dying miserably on a cold cement shelter floor. 

These family pets can now be loaded up in the dumpster headed for the nearest landfill.

4 Million Homeless Animals per year are killed every year in the US alone. This is not euthanasia. This is slaughter, pure and simple. The numbers are staggering and frightening.  The killing of cats and dogs by the millions every year must be stopped!

In the meantime, fortunately, there is a huge network of animal rescuers working their asses off out there in an effort to save as many as they can.  It’s a world I never knew existed prior to this year but I wonder now I could have gone so long not knowing.  It’s a world I certainly never plan to leave. I have found my calling at last.

Upcoming blogs will include more about the world of homeless shelter animals and their plight.  This is a crisis and it is the ultimate in animal cruelty.  It is betrayal of our best friends.

Low cost spay/neuter clinics should be made available in all areas of the country.  Trap/Neuter/Release (TNR) programs should be supported every where and NO KILL shelters should be the only acceptable form of animal control.  Puppy mills and backyard breeders need to be shut down.  Pet stores that sell from puppy mills and backyard breeders need to boycotted and publicly humiliated into taking the animals out of the store fronts. 

More services need to be made available to pet owners who are struggling financially.  More support needs to be given to them to encourage them to keep their family pet rather than abandon it to the local shelter. 

There are a myriad of ways that North America could achieve a full 100% NO KILL goal in the animal shelters across the land.  TOAC will be featuring some of these in upcoming issues taken from Nathan Winograd’s Redemption and Irreconcilable Differences.  Nathan is a major player in the No Kill Movement and TOAC fully supports his message.

Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America

Thanks again for remaining on the RSS feed for updates.  If you haven’t signed up for RSS, make sure you do because there’s a lot of stuff here you don’t want to miss.

Be back soon.

No related posts.