Shock

Apparently I spend a lot of time at the pound. Tonight two of the techs asked if I wanted to throw a sleeping bag on the floor and move in.

It was an unusually hard night. As soon as I walked in the door, I was told that every cat in the adoption room would have to be out by 3:00 on Sunday. They had decided that all of the cats had been exposed to upper respiratory infection, and they want to disinfect the room. This seems strange to me because URI is constantly present in the adoption room; it has always been present in the adoption room. It will be completely contaminated again within a week or two, once more cats are put there that were exposed to URI before they arrived. In any case, there are about 30 cats that need to be rescued.

As I was walking through the kennels, I spotted a chihuaha having a seizure on the wet concrete floor. I ran to find a staff member. I'm worried it might have been distemper, a highly contagious disease that attacks the nervous system, and the chihuaha's two kennel mates will be euthanized just because they were exposed.

The kennel cards for animals being released for rescue are kept in the treatment room. Sick and injured animals are kept in cages in one half of the room; animals are euthanized in the other half. The basket for the rescue cards is on the euthanasia half of the room. If you're there after hours, and you need to see a rescue card, you can either find a kennel tech and ask him to fetch it for you, or you can go in yourself and risk witnessing a scene like the one I saw tonight. A dog I had been petting just 15 minutes ago, an old Mexican Hairless dog with terrible skin lesions, was dead on top of a pile of carcasses heaped in a wheelbarrow. A black cat was lying lifeless on the counter with a syringe still in its heart. The floor in front of the rescue card basket was stained with shit and blood where a dozen animals had recently died.

To top off the evening, a little chihuahua that had been hit by a car was huddled in a small cage on the floor of the intake area. It was curled in a tight ball, its eyes wide open but not focused on anything. There were no apparent signs of injury, but it seemed to be in shock, or at least deeply traumatized. Its eyes blinked when I crouched down in front of the cage and spoke to it softly, but it didn't respond otherwise. I opened the cage and straightened one of its ears that was bent backwards; I stroked its head and shoulders and back. No response. I checked its gums; they were pink, which is good. But there were small drops of pinkish liquid coming from its nose. When the kennel teched picked it up, it urinated in terror.

I feel like I've been punched in the emotional gut. I feel like I need to disinfect my brain. I feel totally exhausted.