Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life by Kotler Steven

Author:Kotler, Steven [Kotler, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2010-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

30

Ever since Otis had died, Joy had been pining for another bull terrier. I had been holding her off. We were still broke, and big dogs are never a minor expense, and this was perhaps the truth—at least some of it. The rest was that I knew that as long as we continued doing dog rescue, by din of nothing more than the limits of life span, dogs would continue to die. I wasn’t sure that was something I wanted to go through again and I wasn’t sure how to solve this problem. Until I figured it out, I didn’t want to add more animals to our pack. But then I came home from Truchas Peak feeling grateful and hopeful, and one thing led to another, and by another I mean Igor.

Igor was a bull terrier puppy with epilepsy. He’d been born in a puppy mill and shipped to a pet store. Then the economy faltered and the pet store went out of business. The breeder didn’t want him back, so Igor ended up living with the pet store’s now jobless groomer. But the groomer couldn’t pay her mortgage and lost her house, and Igor got trucked to Southern California Bull Terrier Rescue, where things didn’t go much better. Under normal conditions, Southern California Bull Terrier Rescue handles about five dogs at any one time. Most find homes within a few months. But over the summer of 2008, with the housing crisis in full swing, they had more than fifty. And few takers—especially for one with epilepsy. For three months no one so much as looked at Igor, but the rescue community is small and tight and news of his plight had spread. Elise heard about him and told Joy and she told me, and that was how it began.

The plan was for Elise to hop on a plane and bring Igor with her. Theoretically, she was supposed to arrive sometime the next afternoon, but ended up missing that flight. On the way to the airport, Elise had been driving by an industrial park in West LA when she spotted a cardboard box sitting beneath an old cargo container. The container was jacked up on blocks and the box was tucked deep beneath. She only saw it for a second, “but, you know,” said Elise, “being me, I was worried that there were puppies inside.”

Some rescuers are magnets. Elise cannot go to the store for milk without finding a stray. Joy often points out that a lot of rescuers have abandonment issues and overcompensate by developing a sixth sense for the abandoned. But even if you don’t go in for the paranormal explanations, there’s plenty of old-fashioned paranoia to be found—Elise once discovered a box of puppies stuffed inside a dumpster, which is also why she made it two blocks past that warehouse before turning around.

Every animal rescuer I’ve met considers their mission a sacred task. I once asked Joy about this and to her it wasn’t much of a question.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.