I'm going to share with you a few pet adventures I've had over the last 6 or so years and if you make it to the end, I'll tell you what all of the tales have in common.
-There was the time that my late cat Paddy had to have a few extractions and when I picked him up from the clinic I was told that one of his teeth shattered but, since there was no x-ray machine on the premises, they had to guess if they got all of the fragments out. Surprise: they didn't. Fortunately my aunt started a GoFundMe to raise the $1,000 needed to fix the damage that was caused (which of course was done by another veterinarian's office).
- When I adopted my late cat Sadie, I was told that she was in perfect health for a senior cat, she just needed a dental cleaning. So I took her into the clinic and after a volunteer (not a tech, a volunteer) traumatized Sadie to the point that she wet herself, the vet comes in, looks at Sadie's mouth and tells me "Oh, she's way beyond a cleaning. She needs to have her teeth pulled." I learned my lesson from the experience with Paddy, but still wasn't prepared to have to take a cat to immediately have all of her teeth pulled when I was told during the adoption process that it wasn't necessary.
-My father adopted a cat for me that was a VERY handsome boy. No health issues I had to worry about. Fast forward 24 hours and he's vomiting blood. By the morning when I woke up, my apartment looked like a crime scene. My dad called the place he got the cat from and at first he was asked to keep him until they found a foster, he refused and they miraculously remembered that the cat has a bleeding ulcer, something never mentioned to him or on paperwork.
-Saving the saddest, and most recent, for last: I was given a senior kitty for my birthday. He was brought to my door the day before my birthday on Friday, June 27th. His name was Lenny, he was 12 and he was buff colored. He had a smokers meow and I loved him right away. Other than him being a senior, no health issues were reported. There wasn't an FIV test done on him, which I found to be strange. Well, it didn't take long for me to notice the giant elephant in the room: Lenny was skin and bones and I couldn't get him to eat. He had a very hard swallow as well. If I knew then what I know now, I would have gotten him into a vet much sooner, but I thought that maybe it was just a matter of finding the right wet food. But none of it was right. I got him into the vet as soon as I could and they confirmed my worst fears. His belly was full of fluid making it hard for him to breathe, let alone eat. His hip bones and spine jutted out because of this. His body had been slowly shutting down the whole time he was with me. THERE WAS NO WAY THE PLACE I GOT HIM FROM DIDN'T KNOW THE SHAPE HE WAS IN. So, with a broken heart, because not long ago I just lost my Sadie girl and here I am doing this again for a poor boy that was so sick yet overlooked, I gave him a kiss and held him when he slipped away.
So what do these stories have in common? Every single one of these were courtesy of The Anna Shelter and/or their clinic next door. I'm not telling anyone what to do or who to support when it comes to adopting animals. I'm only talking about MY experiences. I'm talking about MY broken heart. I'm someone that was raised to love animals, and I do. I love them enough to never, ever, entrust any animal with them again. Whether it be a stray in need or someone asking me where they should adopt from or donate, I will *never* have anything to do with that shelter again. In memory of Paddy, Sadie, Lenny and every other pet owned by anyone that was hurt, ignored while in pain, handled roughly by people that shouldn't even be handling pets in a medical setting, from all of us against declawing, here is a hearty GOOD BYE. read more