Hi, everybody, and here’s a little poetry for you today. HUGE TRIGGER ALERT: It is about animal euthanasia. It’s a very difficult topic to discuss with civilians, but thousands of animal welfare workers across the country have to perform this procedure every day. It literally never gets easier. The reasons vary from shelter to shelter, but the huge amount of scorn and anger heaped upon those who do it does not make it easier to live with. I’ve literally been called a “murderer” to my face, at least twice. I’m definitely willing to answer and and all questions and explain why, until there many fewer homeless pets, the dying will not stop.
The Doberman pictured is my Jack, who was up for adoption until he became temperamentally unsound after being kenneled for four months; I adopted him to avoid his being put down (photo via DMS Photography)
Thanks to Salome Valentine, as well, for being the unsuspecting and very brave first Crasstalk reader.
“Terrible Things”
You do want to save them all.
You know you can’t save them all. Being in charge of a death,
no matter how small, is like diving into a quarry over and over,
knowing there’s water there but never losing that feeling you’ll hit the bottom.
“It’s what we do, it’s herd management,” you say.
It never changes the fact that you got here because you wanted to help,
not because you wanted to see them die.
This life is only for tough girls. You know that now
because all the women you work with, at least the ones that are
good at what you do, have seen the kinds of things you have.
Not the little deaths of feral kittens,
and not the dogs you got to love ferociously for a short time
until you have to hold them, be soothing and strong
as you inject them with “the blue stuff.”
You wonder as you do it what it feels like, if it’s cold,
if it’s that dizzy buzzy feeling you got when they put the IV in you
and you said goodbye to that thing, 4 months strong, inside you.
These women are hard from a life that came from
feeling those little deaths all the time:
parents divorced, a dad who hit them, a spouse that was killed,
it all increasingly more hurtful,
a life that’s just been such a struggle, a life that just didn’t turn out
the way they would have planned it.
Those little things rub inside until there’s a callus.
There’s enough skin there that taking a life is just
another hard thing you do.
You want to be good at it.
The people who teach you how tell you
that skill and confidence are the best things you can bring to euthanasia.
“Good death,” they all tell you in the classes about the greek roots
of the word, and you do believe it. You are here because you have to do it,
and you want it to be that elusive “good death.”
But you worry sometimes it isn’t,
especially when you don’t have that collected calm,
that skill and confidence they told you to have.
You wonder if you’re like the nurse that couldn’t find your vein,
poking and digging in your arm, your hand, your wrist
with that cold, rigid needle and apologizing,
all the while you getting more and more nervous and hurt.
Saying nothing.
Saying it’s fine.
It’s the most macho thing you do,
to pretend it doesn’t hurt.
In this job you have to have an outlet, they say,
a release.
But all the gallows humor and unspoken guilt you have
in those brief moments after you do it doesn’t change the fact
that no one outside of there knows how it feels,
and when you have three beers or a bottle of wine
after work on those days you sometimes see
the lifeless thing YOU MADE THAT WAY.
Your boyfriend says he has bad days at work too,
and when he says that you are able to look at him with disdain,
and say his bad days never involve taking a life.
You coolly win the battle of who has a harder time,
but you know that winning the point doesn’t assuage
the thing still buried in you,
that thing you refuse to call pain.
They say it’s easy to hate people in this profession,
the ones that look at you with eyes as wide
as those on the living thing they dump into your hands
when they ask if they’ll find a home, as if
they hadn’t had one until fifteen minutes ago.
They want you to tell them what they want to hear,
that everyone goes to a huge house with a big yard
and everything a pet could ever want. Sometimes
you want to soothe them, make them feel better
about the choices you know are hard.
Other times you want to look them dead in the eye
and explain to them exactly what they’re doing,
leaving an animal to be confused and scared
like you were when you were a child,
wondering why you were wrong again, and
wondering what inexplicable thing would come next.
Not in my backyard, these people are saying.
I love animals but I don’t want this one.
I can’t keep it but I don’t want you to kill it.
Fine, you say.
You’ve had to suffer the consequences
all your life, anyway.
You resent the people who feel like they’ve
walked away absolved,
because you never are,
you’ve done terrible things
and you remember every one.
