No Place Like Home....

Each season brings its special difficulties to the lives of homeless creatures. Just as summer’s choking heat will make fast work of bringing down a sick or injured animal, so will winter’s freezing cold. Bitter weather lowers our precision which in turn lowers our potential to succeed in securing an animal who needs help, particularly if the situation requires lengthy and sustained effort. The bitter cold bites at our fingers and penetrates our clothing, but we have a warm car awaiting our return. Homeless animals have no recourse for getting warm; they must search out food and water in the cold, sleep in the cold, find places to hide in the cold. They have no choice but to get through it somehow without relief or die in its grip.

Another unrelenting hardship for animals on the streets in winter is the scarcity of water. Just as summer’s heat quickly evaporates the puddles that provide their drinking water, winter’s cold freezes them. In different ways, the heat and the cold bring about the same result; stealing water from animals desperately needing to replenish their bodies with moisture. An occasional driving rain brings temporary relief, otherwise a stinging thirst follows them through the days and nights of their struggles as they cling to the only life they know.

One factor of our work that never changes - the reason for Alley Animals’ existence as a humane organization - is the presence of homeless and abandoned animals who need our help. The fact that the alley route has grown from a 3 1/2 hour trip to one of 14 hours indicates the opposite. One might question why we continue to travel the alleys night after night (at no small risk to ourselves) and shoulder ever-rising expenses (medicines and veterinary bills, maintenance for the alley car, and the cost of 600 pounds of food needed for one week in the alleys).

But to ask this question is to weigh abstractions - personal risk against the group’s achievements, runaway expenses against a small working budget, difficulty of the work against tangible results. Weighing factors and assessing progress has its place in any constructive enterprise, but judging Alley Animals’ work cannot be done in any context other than the alleys themselves. I have helped lift a dog with two broken front legs into the car; I have watched my partner secure in a carrier a young cat who was so sick she was in the beginning stages of dying; yet if we had not been there to take these animals from the streets they would have lingered, the pinnacle of their pain and suffering not yet upon them but already severe enough to be quite beyond our grasp. In many an alley’s darkness I have heard the footsteps of animals disturb the trash and broken glass lying everywhere; I cannot see them but I hear them coming to eat the food we’ve left. In other alleys animals show themselves even before we put out food. I see their faces and I cannot forget.

So, in answering the question as to why we continue to travel the alleys when the presence of homeless and abandonded animals persists - perhaps even increases - I call to mind their faces, the look in their eyes, the sound of their footsteps, and my answer is to ask a second question: How could we stop?