"The animals have no voice but ours..."

I wish...

January 11, 2008
Jennifer Vanderau

You know, even as I grow older each year, I find I still have wishes.

I wish everybody could just be nice to each other. I wish every animal had a home. Sometimes I even wish the dreams I had when I was young could have come true. At least a little.

And, yes, I know the old adage, “If wishes were horses….” Still, every once in a while, I wish anyway.

I especially wish we could assist every single person who asks for help from this shelter.

Recently we’ve been getting calls about abandoned cats or injured animals. The messages say that the animals are “somewhere along that road” or “running along that street.”

Here’s the deal. We will pick up stray or injured animals in our contracted service areas if they are contained. Please, please make note of these words: in our contracted service areas and if they are contained.

I wish we had someone who could spend all day looking for lost or wandering pets. I really do. That way when we get the calls of “somewhere along that road” we could send someone out. It would be fantastic if we could race to the rescue after every call we get.

But the truth of the matter is, we can’t. We don’t have the staff to do that. Every day all of us who are inside these doors work for the animals we have in our shelter – cleaning up after them, feeding them, medicating them, assessing their behaviors. It’s a 365 day a year job that doesn’t end.

We simply do not have the manpower or quite frankly the time to chase after all the animals that were seen “running along that street.” Even if they are injured, we’ve discovered an injured animal can get surprisingly far on a bad leg.

One of the reasons we don’t go out if an animal isn’t contained is, quite frankly, because we’ve done it before. No joke. We had a report of a poor dog running loose in the woods at Caledonia. The woman on the phone was so adamant that we come find the dog, we bent our policies and did what she asked. Two of our staff members wandered the woods in Caledonia for more than an hour.

With drive time, keep in mind, that meant two of our staff members were out of the shelter for almost two hours. With the two of them gone, that left us with maybe three others in the building to help potential adopters, answer phones, process adoption applications, clean up after the animals, give them their second doses of medication and get them ready for bed.

The two staff members on their trek through the woods returned without the dog because, as we all knew, they couldn’t find him.

That trip to the woods set us back more than two hours. That was two hours when second feedings could have been done. That was two hours when three or four assessments could have been made on the animals inside our kennels. That was two hours when we could have had help with medications.

We simply do not have the time to chase animals all over the area. We don’t.

I know because of that, we get comments like, “Don’t you care?” or “You’re a shelter; you’re supposed to rescue animals.”

The answer to both is yes. Yes, we care and yes, we rescue animals. But we often can’t do it alone. We need help. And that’s where we ask the community for one more thing.

If you find an animal and can bring him or her to the shelter, that would be fantastic. It would be such a help have the animals come to us so we can have all our staff here ready to get the cages set up and get the animals as comfortable as we can make them.

If you can’t bring the animal to us, we ask that you confine the animal in some way – a box, a fence, a front porch – and stay with the animal until we can arrive at the scene, so we’ll know exactly where to look and the animal will be waiting for us when we get there.

We do the best we can with the resources we’ve got. We work very hard every day, every year to do what we can for homeless pets, but we just don’t have the facility or staff to do it all alone.

So if members of the community would be willing to help us help the animals, we can continue to provide the services we do to the four-legged critters in our area.

Until we reach a point where all my wishes can come true, we’re all going to have to work together to fight for the welfare of our furry friends – to make sure they’re safe, sheltered, adopted and loved.  

*****

CVAS, Inc.
2325 Country Road Chambersburg, PA 17202
(P) 717- 263-5791 · (F) 717- 263-2042  cvasadmin@innernet.net