Rescue Journal

and then there is rescue

Carol · Dec 14, 2007

i read on TG's blog that they have had enough, they are closing their doors. sounds to me like they are hurting pretty badly up there. rescue takes every ounce of us...every cell focused and drained for every last drop just to keep going on some days. some days are so utterly horrid, so brutal, so endless and suddenly, we are drained dry. we are as dead and finished and as empty as the shells of the bodies i carry from here when my beloved friends die.

oh those days of hurtful emptiness, when there is nothing left except regret and anger and darkness. those are the days that i fear the most.

it is always rescue related humans who will destroy a rescuer..it won't be the animals or the losers who dump them...we can try to fight those and win the battle for an animal's life but we will never win in a battle with other rescue. they know where to hurt us, they know where to slide that knife that severs our will to go on...they know because they fear the same knife thrust, they fear that aloneness in the dark.

maybe we hang out with dogs too much, maybe we develop that pack mentality. maybe we listen too much to the praises of others and find ourselves rising too far above. maybe our anger at how hard our life is makes us strike out and knock someone else to the ground.

maybe we took our eyes off of our animals and started looking for something besides that long awaited smile on their face, maybe we started looking into other backyards because we didn't want to look at the mess in our own.

i don't know if this time yvette will really close TG doors forever...i don't know that someday i might not close the gates of saints too when i feel i just can't take anymore.

the only thing i do know is that i did not sign up for this...i signed up for something cleaner and brighter and full of less pain. and i am watching and learning and pondering and wondering as i watch this bloodbath run thru the heart of rescue.

sigh...i started this blog because i wanted to share what rescue at saints really means to me here. and i said i would share both the good and the ugly because it is both that surrounds every rescuer every day.

today i grieve not just the eventual loss of my best friend ellie but all hope for a rescue community filled with decency and respect. we are just petty, selfish, mean spirited humans, like the losers who dump the animals here, no better, no worse, but frighteningly just the same.

rescue is in a sad state of affairs.

Comments

lburrell

It will be even better than that. It will be, "It wasn't me: it was THEM."

Deb

If Turtle Gardens closes, the blood of hundreds, maybe thousands of animals will be on the hands of a few angry, misguided, thoughtless people. I wonder whether those same people will step up to shoulder the responsibilities TG has carried so far and for so long. Somehow I doubt it. Somehow I think they will do what casually cruel people always do, make excuses for abominable behaviour, hide behind "I didn't mean any harm". Screw that, this assault on TG was planned and executed with malice. I hope the people responsible are happy.

lburrell

Well, I think it's true for the most part that we are "just petty, selfish, mean spirited humans, like the losers who dump the animals here, no better, no worse, but frighteningly just the same". That's been the trouble with every good institution from the beginning; rescue is not privileged in that regard. With politics, it's corruption. With the church, it's like the Inquisition. With rescue, it's the kind of petty bloodbath we saw this last week.

What can we do with that? I think you just continue to chop wood and carry water. After all--you can argue the rights and wrongs about it, and you can have all the opinions you like about the niceness of it, but 4000 dogs is 4000 dogs. That's just a lot of freaking work and money, as no one would know better than you, Carol.

I can't imagine what it's like to put in all that freaking work and money and then be slapped in the face and raked over the coals about it. It must be the worst feeling in the world.

I do know that if I was standing outside the Pearly Gates, I'd rather be met by 4000 dogs I saved than by 300 dogs who died because I put a rescue out of business.