So, the world is upside down for a lot of people right now, and there are a lot of things happening all over the world. In our own worlds here, we are seeing huge changes both in the rescue and in the private lives of our Board members. Of course, what rescue wouldn't be complete without someone going entirely off the rails at least annually, right?
Well, this time we will share the entirety of the exchange we had with our periodic rail greaser. This time it is one Sandy Schedlosky, who, meaning well, took a kitten who needs medical care to the emergency vet. This is a wonderful act of care, and we love when people reach out to help as much as they can. Yesterday, 2 of our Board members spent the day dealing with some pretty heavy stuff, and when the message came that there was an injured kitten, one of them had a bit of a cry over the rescue's current financial position because it meant we couldn't help out financially. Here's how the conversation played out.
Now, these screen shots are trimmed so that they go in proper order and, with the exception of the last one, reduce the amount of reading the same thing over again for the reader.
And here's the thing. We wouldn't be posting this today but Sandy decided that rather than simmering down and rereading the parts where she was told;
- we are in the middle of a reset
- we cannot do any intakes right now
- if we said yes, it would be irresponsible on our part (verbatim was "whether we would be able to properly support him and that isn't fair at all")
- We would be happy to set her up with supplies in the meantime (this is not just a "can of food" as Ms. Shedlosky so wonderfully put it in her attempt to minimise us offering the help that we are capable of at this time. The gratitude was palpable, I tell you.)
- funds are non-existent (what we did not tell her because quite frankly she has no reason to know is that we are handling 3 spays, a mastectomy, and a few other projects we are trying to get off the ground. And right now the rescue has just a little over $100 in the account.)
- we have to move our current adoptables before we can do anything at all.
- it was offered to her that we would reach out to other rescues to see if they could help.
As you can see, Sandy was ever so gracious in her response, telling us that she understood and that it was unfortunate that we were unable to assist. She even offered to lend help to us or another rescue so that it wasn't such a struggle! She kindly thanked us for our offer of food, litter, litter box, toys, etc... that come with having a cat in the house but declined, saying she didn't want to burden our already taxed organisation.
Just kidding. She posted a scathing review on google, thinking we wouldn't respond! And you know, a lot of rescues won't, because a lot of rescues don't want to upset people or rock the boat. We are a little different here though. You see, we value human beings just as much as we value animals. We will go to the mat for either one, and sometimes that means we show much more compassion for situations which would enrage others, but sometimes it means calling people out when they are acting like assholes. In this case, going to the mat for the kitten meant saying that we are unable to help with his emergency care bill, but offering what we could for the care he needed for the time he was in her care. And this post isn't about going to the mat for the person Sandy talked to, she has a pretty thick skin. It's about going to the mat for the rescue community as a whole.
Rescue workers are stretched. It's what we do. Very few of us get paid (in fact, none of the ones in our rescue take a salary at all.) so what we do, we do out of passion, and out of compassion. Yet the general public seems to believe that we are invincible and have bottomless pockets. That we don't feel those little darts thrown at us every time we express grief for losing a hard case (why didn't you do x? Well, you can't save them all.), or when we have to say no to an intake or when we have to explain to a person why their husbandry is making their companion sick. It's like being pecked to death by a lazy duck. And you know, we grin and bear it most of the time.
There is not a single person who got into animal rescue because they wanted to do nothing. There is not a single person who does rescue who feels good about having to say "I'm so sorry, we are at capacity. Not even one more." And very few of us can do so and go to bed without crying a little bit because we don't know what the fate of that little one would be. Because we all wish we had infinite funds and infinite space and infinite time to help every single struggling soul out there. And I am not complaining. No, this is not a complaint at all because another thing about rescuers is that rescuing them is what keeps us going. It's what makes the world a little better.
So I'm not posting this because Sandy is a meanie. I make no judgments as to the overall character of Sandy, despite her behaviour being entitled, childish, and petty. Who knows, maybe this is a one-off (although given that she had already been hung up on by another rescue prior to contacting us...) I'm posting this because there are thousands of Sandys out there, who would attempt to browbeat a rescue into taking in more than they can, and then strut about, bleating about how they saved that poor little kitten as though she had done anything more than a quick drive to a vet and some snotty messages. And there are thousands of rescuers who will get these messages from the Sandys of the world and say nothing. They would take the character assasinations, the pettiness, the snarling, and the holier-than-thou declarations of the Sandys and they would put it in their already heavy rucksack of shitty comments from ignorant people, and say nothing, and just add it to the load.
That's not how we work here. And maybe it isn't as nice as the image of rescue is supposed to be. Most rescues have a face of cute, and smiles, and happiness. We don't. We do the shit that needs doing because it needs doing. We are, in contrast to most other rescues out there, pretty unfiltered about the truth of it all, the including how the same people who consider themselves saviours to animals will just as quickly (and gleefully) abuse another human being. That doesn't make us better and hell, maybe it is part of why we aren't seen as easily as others. But it's who we are.
So next time you decide you want to be a Sandy, I want you to remember the motto of our rescue. Well. The whole motto of the rescue. It's isn't just "do all things with kindness..."
Do you know that the ellipsis is there for?
