Let me ask you to consider something: You're experiencing a stressful and traumatic time in your life. You've lost your job, your housing. You are moving in with family, or to a shelter, or into your car.
You left your child sobbing at home because you're taking your dog, who can't come where you're going, and has a worrisome cough, and whose kibble is competing with your child's breakfast in your budget, to the shelter.
You're feeling hopeless and ashamed, and a condescending or apathetic shelter worker shoves a form at you, with one short, blank line following the words "Reason for surrender."
You write, "Moving" because that's true even though there is no spot to explain you lost everything and must leave your home.
And later that night, some white, middle class animal welfare advocate posts it to social media along with a rant about how you dumped your pet at the shelter and didn't care. That you walked away without looking back, even though your dog strained after you.
She called you a "POS." A piece of shit.
Nearly all the stories you hear about why people are surrendering their pets at the shelter are false because the forms don't tell their actual story.
A small number are true made by humans without compassion, who you can't do anything about, and who don't really care what you think anyway.
And a few, I suppose, are the truth told by people who are are honestly seeking SHELTER for their pets and aren't yet aware we will condemn them mercilessly for that.
If you have never been in their shoes, be grateful.
If you can't imagine being in their shoes, try harder.
Either way, stop telling stories about them. You do not and cannot know the real story.
And the ones you're spreading are unhelpful and almost always false.
You left your child sobbing at home because you're taking your dog, who can't come where you're going, and has a worrisome cough, and whose kibble is competing with your child's breakfast in your budget, to the shelter.
You're feeling hopeless and ashamed, and a condescending or apathetic shelter worker shoves a form at you, with one short, blank line following the words "Reason for surrender."
You write, "Moving" because that's true even though there is no spot to explain you lost everything and must leave your home.
And later that night, some white, middle class animal welfare advocate posts it to social media along with a rant about how you dumped your pet at the shelter and didn't care. That you walked away without looking back, even though your dog strained after you.
She called you a "POS." A piece of shit.
Nearly all the stories you hear about why people are surrendering their pets at the shelter are false because the forms don't tell their actual story.
A small number are true made by humans without compassion, who you can't do anything about, and who don't really care what you think anyway.
And a few, I suppose, are the truth told by people who are are honestly seeking SHELTER for their pets and aren't yet aware we will condemn them mercilessly for that.
If you have never been in their shoes, be grateful.
If you can't imagine being in their shoes, try harder.
Either way, stop telling stories about them. You do not and cannot know the real story.
And the ones you're spreading are unhelpful and almost always false.
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