Friday, February 4, 2011
How to save a life
I love watching Dogtown ... all curled up with my own cats and dogs, comfy and cozy on a Saturday night. Like many others in the animal loving community, one of my pet pipe dreams is to have such a sanctuary here in Nova Scotia.
Will we ever have a Best Friends North here? Probably not. In a province where wonderful ideas like Low Cost / High Volume Spay Neuter Clinics are relegated to the back burner for lack of funding, even an optimist like myself understands that a physical sanctuary is more pipe dream than possibility.
Long before recycling and reusing were fashionable, people in the Maritimes were experts at making do. Jars saved for jam making ... tin cans kept for 'scareaway' lines strung in gardens ... staining wood fences and shingles with secondhand car oil ... you get the idea.
So it should come as no surprise that some of the animal rescue groups and shelters are well versed in thinking outside the box. Does the absence of an actual sanctuary mean there are no options out there for rescued pets in need of Palliative care? That the ones who are too frail or too ill to be adopted have no other options?
Not always. Last year Metro won an award for its wonderful Palliative Foster Care program.
Before that, Beagle Paws realized that so many of the beagles surrendered to them are so senior or frail that they remain in permanent foster for the rest of their lives that they instituted their Angel Program.
Now East Coast German Shepherd Rescue is starting their own Palliative Care Program. They are recruiting fosters .. and no, you don't have to live in the HRM area to volunteer for this.
Palliative care actually is part and parcel of No Kill ... and any group that is actually No Kill does not give anyone already in their care a Premature Unhappy Tail. The operative word there being 'already'. The ability of a group to accept and care for pets that do not have years of love to offer is often directly connected to having volunteers willing to do palliative care foster.
What does that mean in realspeak? It means that anyone who volunteers for this special type of fostering is definitely saving a life!
Being a palliative care foster parent IS different than 'regular' fostering, where pets are nurtured and schooled in the social skills they need to be adopted. Pets in palliative care have reached their destination and will not be journeying on to a new home.
It takes a kind heart to foster and it is quite common to see "foster failures" who simply could not bring themselves to part with the pet in their care. People who think they would be 'foster failures' might actually be very good at palliative care fostering. After all, a pet is not an appliance or a car and there are no guarantees as to how much time we will be granted with any pet of any age.
Palliative care fosters are at liberty to open their hearts completely because nobody has to wave good-bye. They might not have years to spend together, but they do have THAT.
In some instances, they have the joy of being able to introduce a good pet to the first love and comfort that pet has ever known. The satisfaction of knowing that this pet has never had it so good.
Best of all, by opening their hearts and their homes to provide a place where pets can live the rest of their lives in peace and dignity, palliative care fosters REALLY are saving a life.
Kind of frosting on the cake that it also provides a splendid opportunity to teach children in the neighbourhood real life lessons about compassion and respect for life.
I believe in animal rights, and high among them is the right to the gentle stroke of a human hand. Robert Brault
Will we ever have a Best Friends North here? Probably not. In a province where wonderful ideas like Low Cost / High Volume Spay Neuter Clinics are relegated to the back burner for lack of funding, even an optimist like myself understands that a physical sanctuary is more pipe dream than possibility.
Long before recycling and reusing were fashionable, people in the Maritimes were experts at making do. Jars saved for jam making ... tin cans kept for 'scareaway' lines strung in gardens ... staining wood fences and shingles with secondhand car oil ... you get the idea.
So it should come as no surprise that some of the animal rescue groups and shelters are well versed in thinking outside the box. Does the absence of an actual sanctuary mean there are no options out there for rescued pets in need of Palliative care? That the ones who are too frail or too ill to be adopted have no other options?
Not always. Last year Metro won an award for its wonderful Palliative Foster Care program.
Before that, Beagle Paws realized that so many of the beagles surrendered to them are so senior or frail that they remain in permanent foster for the rest of their lives that they instituted their Angel Program.
Now East Coast German Shepherd Rescue is starting their own Palliative Care Program. They are recruiting fosters .. and no, you don't have to live in the HRM area to volunteer for this.
Palliative care actually is part and parcel of No Kill ... and any group that is actually No Kill does not give anyone already in their care a Premature Unhappy Tail. The operative word there being 'already'. The ability of a group to accept and care for pets that do not have years of love to offer is often directly connected to having volunteers willing to do palliative care foster.
What does that mean in realspeak? It means that anyone who volunteers for this special type of fostering is definitely saving a life!
Being a palliative care foster parent IS different than 'regular' fostering, where pets are nurtured and schooled in the social skills they need to be adopted. Pets in palliative care have reached their destination and will not be journeying on to a new home.
It takes a kind heart to foster and it is quite common to see "foster failures" who simply could not bring themselves to part with the pet in their care. People who think they would be 'foster failures' might actually be very good at palliative care fostering. After all, a pet is not an appliance or a car and there are no guarantees as to how much time we will be granted with any pet of any age.
Palliative care fosters are at liberty to open their hearts completely because nobody has to wave good-bye. They might not have years to spend together, but they do have THAT.
In some instances, they have the joy of being able to introduce a good pet to the first love and comfort that pet has ever known. The satisfaction of knowing that this pet has never had it so good.
Best of all, by opening their hearts and their homes to provide a place where pets can live the rest of their lives in peace and dignity, palliative care fosters REALLY are saving a life.
Kind of frosting on the cake that it also provides a splendid opportunity to teach children in the neighbourhood real life lessons about compassion and respect for life.
I believe in animal rights, and high among them is the right to the gentle stroke of a human hand. Robert Brault
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
A Miracle by any other name .....
I'm a middle aged grandmother with decades of experience baking, so I'm not always a fan of getting on the scale. To be perfectly honest, as long as my jeans don't seem to be getting tight, I tend to leave the scale in the back of the closet!
And NO, I am not talking about the pair of stretch denim jeans that I accidentally bought at Frenchies one time! It took exactly one wearing to realize that the darned things KEPT stretching every time I bent over ... and being 56 not 16 I didn't particularly care for THAT look!
For the past couple of days, the Internet has been all afire about the Tragically Unhappy Tail for the Huskies out in BC. Is that a bad thing? Of course not! I just wish that the general public could get THAT upset about the hundreds of thousands of cats who are killed in shelters around this country ... and the hundreds of thousands more who are shot/ drowned/ or meet a myriad of Equally Unhappy Tails.
Even when the Cape Breton SPCA was killing so many cats they needed to use a gas chamber to keep up, there wasn't this kind of public moral outrage. The only person in NS to be prosecuted for killing cats in my memory got a whopping five dollar fine!
Yes sir indeedy, the difference between cats and dogs is definitely more than purely anatomical ...sigh.
And that is why I am always overjoyed when I hear of folks who pull out all the stops for the kitties.
In December, the Clarenville SPCA had a bomb dropped in their lap. On the 23rd, a cat that had been neutered two days before became violently ill. 
One of their volunteers took the little darling up to the clinic and thankfully she stayed with him to find out what was going on. His belly was bloated and he was vomiting yellow fluid. Immediately the clinic went into Panic overload and started talking FIP and that if he had it, the shelter would have to kill all their cats.
They almost died at that thought but after research they realized that the clinic had FIP and Pan Leuk mixed up. FIP is trasferred by feces and saliva and as this cat was always in a condo, he wouldn't have been able to pass it to others.
The decision was made to keep him comfy for the weekend. At the same time, the shelter was under total quarantine for cats until they got the results back.
Later that afternoon the vet clinic called the shelter to let them know that they had given him dexamethasone and he was responding well. The next morning he was eating, happy and just a purring.
A Miracle it seemed but they still didn't know what was happening. They took him off the dex on Sat and he regressed. Put him on and he did well. After a bit, the clinic realized that it was viral pneumonia.
He went back at the shelter in isolation and Blood samples were taken two weeks apart to determine if it was FIP or pan leuk. The down side was that there could be no adoptions until this was sorted out but that was more than outweighed by the upside ... which of course is that nobody panicked and killed all the cats at the shelter needlessly. ( The subject of how often that is done .. and in some instances by folks purporting to be No Kill ... is a sticky wicket for another day )
The short version of this story is that Rolo, whose name really should be Miracle, has recovered and his adorable self is available for adoption from the Clarenville SPCA.
What time is it? In a world where so many are still second class kittizens even after they are rescued ... where roomfuls of cats can be given Unneccessary Unhappy Tails ... it is time to understand that the Real Miracle here is seeing kind hearts who pull out the stops for their kitties.
The smallest feline is a masterpiece. Leonardo Da Vinci
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