'Cause you know, when you join a new group, a great way to make friends and influence people is to lecture them. Or better yet, judge them and then lecture them.
One wouldn't want to sit back and decide a) you all are nuts, this is not the group/activity for me & I'm leaving quietly before someone makes eye contact or b) you seem nuts but I'll quietly stick around to see why, because I like to live dangerously. (By the way, if you choose b), you run a real risk of being infected by crabby rescue disease and soon you too will become political and once in a while, you might be party to some drama.)
No, what's better is to leap in and try to kumbayah your way to a better, brighter, more butterflier world, the one with rainbows and unicorns shitting gold bricks! Hugs! Kittens! Savasana!
Actually, I do think a lot of rescue is messed up. Because as someone smart noted, rescue is made of people. And people are like this. Messy.
There's always this weird disconnect for me when people get all hot and bothered about the fact that people get hot and bothered. Did you know even yoga & meditation message boards have huge flame wars? Yes, really. So it doesn't really seem surprising to me that animal rescuers would have serious disagreements. And there was an element to this obsevation/lecture that we were on the receiving end of, which bothered me more and more, the more I thought about it.
Because we were being accused of being shallow ego driven harpies (I paraphrase with great abandon & harpies were not mentioned. Ego, however, was. Several times). That got me riled enough to pen this - reproduced here for those of you who are not on this secret facebook group of harpies who argue.
Complete with any typos but as a bonus benefit for blog readers, I'll actually put in paragraph breaks. The poor FB audience had to muddle through this mess with no white space!
I think you're unfairly judging & characterizing some of the conflict in terms of ego. I'll be the 1st to admit that some rescuers have atrocious people skills & come across like hyper leash reactive terriers :D But to say 'aren't we all here for the animals? why don't we get along?' is as naive as saying "aren't all MP's here for the good of the country? why don't you all get along?"
The fact is that every decision you make in rescue is fundamentally a question of ethics, & what I see is not people arguing ego, but rather passionately striving to find the ethics in what is a bloody, dirty little war. For every dog you help, there are thousands you do NOT help & so how do you justify what you do?
The ethical choices & decisions are HUGE and we do a disservice to characterize them as some sort of immature squabbling. If you stay in rescue for a while you'll have to grapple with really, really difficult issues. Whom do you help? This or that breed? The mutts? The one that is in front of you, or another one who might be in bigger need? Do you spend $5000 of hard, fundraised money on 1 dog's "necessary to survive surgery or do you put that dog gently to sleep and spend it on getting 25 dogs spayed/neutered and adopted?
Do you 'rescue' from a pet store? Do you 'rescue' from a breeder? Do you 'liberate' a neglected animal? Where are your lines?
Every rescuer that I've grown to know for any length of time has had to figure this out, has had to find a place where they can live with their decisions, at least for a little bit....but the good ones are always questioning, is this the right thing to do? What is the impact? What will have the greatest impact? Sure, buying that dog from a petstore saves THAT dog, but I think we all know it doesn't actually have the impact we all want to have.
There are some general accepted ethical guidelines but there's an awful lot of grey & that's where you find the friction. While I sometimes wish it could be expressed better, I do think that expecting it all to go away is completely unreasonable and frankly, not helpful to the animals in the long run. Sometimes we need to question what we've always done, consider whether different approaches are more fruitful & ponder our bigger goals of how to achieve a society where every pet has a home.
And a propos of nothing really but I've been reading economist jokes and I like this one ...
The First Law of Economics: For every economist, there exists an equal and opposite economist.
The Second Law of Economics: They're both wrong.
*ps. if you haven't seen the Shelter Humor video with the unicorns shitting gold bricks, you really must click on that link above
