What it's like to work in an animal shelter

Animal shelters are really a place of complete mixed emotions. Within a single day, or even an hour, we can see the best and worst things humanity has to offer. There have been days where we have someone come in with a big donation towards an animal they heard had an injury. That person makes me feel like life is good, and people are good, and the world is good. But then, two hours later, someone leaves their dog in their car in a parking lot in 100-degree weather, and calls me a cunt because I have the audacity to charge them a fine and let a police officer give them a ticket.

In the mornings, we clean up shit. Literal shit, pee, puke, sometimes blood. We have three hours in the morning to make the place presentable to the public, and make sure the animals are fed, make sure they are medicated, make sure they are all accounted for. Some days, we have no help at all, just our meager staff of somewhere between three and six people cleaning every cage and kennel in the facility. I don’t know if you have ever seen the kennel of a dog that’s been unattended for 12+ hours, but it’s gross. Imagine what an un-housebroken animal might do with its feces in a confined space for that long. Imagine that kennel multiplied by seventy. That’s what we get to clean every day, and that’s not even including the cats or chihuahuas in small cages.  So we sweat our asses off in 100-degree weather, or pouring rain, to make sure these animals don’t have to be in their own crap for any longer than is absolutely necessary.

Then we open to the public, and they walk in with noses plugged and say, “Wow. It smells in here.”
Well, what do you think it would smell like when you have one-hundred-and-something animals in one place?

I don’t know how many times I’ve sat on the cold, hard concrete floor of a kennel with a terrified dog in my lap with tears streaming down my face. I can’t even ask myself why the animals end up there anymore, because it’s too sad. I try to focus on the fact that at least they made it somewhere safe, and at least we are there to love them, and at least they will have a fair chance at a life better than what could have been in whatever situation, but sometimes that’s not enough. Sometimes I don’t have the time to sit with any animal at all because I’m so busy make sure they aren’t stepping in their own poop, and making sure customers at the front desk aren’t verbally berating my coworkers or myself because we said, “we don’t have the room to take your animal right now. I realize it’s peeing on the carpet, but we have a waiting list for surrenders.”

When people ask where I work, they say, “That must be so fun. You get to play with animals all day!” But they don’t realize that we don’t. I wish we did. The animals wish we did, but there’s no time to socialize them nearly as much as we should. We are busy fighting fires and calming down disgruntled people who are angry they have to pay for our services when their dog was found running in the middle of a busy road, unattended. Rather than saying, “Thank you for taking care of my beloved lost pet. I was so worried.” They say, “How could you charge me that much money! He’s only been there for an hour!”

Do you know what can happen in an hour? An animal can be hit and killed, or severely mangled. Did you know? In the hour that your animal was at the shelter, we have examined, vaccinated, and soothed your animal. We have set up a clean kennel for your animal. After your animal leaves, we have to re-sanitize that kennel, EVEN IF THE ANIMAL WAS ONLY THERE FOR ONE MINUTE. That is because we want your animal to be healthy, and safe, not because we are dick-heads that want to take your money for some crazy governmental conspiracy in which you are the prime target.

Then, someone comes in and sees you cuddling a cute fuzzy little dog and says, “Are you going to kill that dog?”
Or you meet a new person who says, “It must be tiring killing animals all day.”

Like the fact that I’m at an animal control facility means I’m a murder machine. How many times a day do we have to explain that we only euthanize animals that are incredibly sick, or super aggressive. And I want to tell them, that every life that comes through our door matters to us, and we don’t take euthanasia lightly. I can remember the face of nearly every dog we have had to put down. Sometimes I think about them when I can’t sleep at night, and no matter how legitimate the reason is for euthanasia, it doesn’t make the decision any easier and it doesn’t make my heart any less heavy.

Working in an animal shelter is like having your heart broken into a million pieces every single day, and for some reason you keep picking up the pieces and gluing them back together when you know full well that tomorrow it’s going to happen all over again.  But I keep coming back, because I can imagine the faces of the dogs staring at me. I hear the voices of people telling me, “I could never work here. I love animals too much.” And I want to slap their well-intentioned statements back into their mouths, because they don’t realize that here I am: this is my expression of a love bigger than I’ve ever known. Love is very reason that I’m at that place every single day, even though some days I don’t think I can do it for even a second longer.