Lost and Found (Dogs, Cats, and Everyday Heroes at a Country Animal Shelter) is a singular book that simultaneously challenges and restores the reader’s faith in humanity.
Lost and Found is a book about the daily trials and tribulations of a country animal shelter. It is a book not just about animals, but also about people and the human psyche.
Before I read this book I couldn’t understand how anyone could abandon or relinquish a pet. Companion animals have no recourse and no social voice. For an owner to make a commitment to an animal and then to renege on that commitment seemed to me to be almost as bad as betraying a little child. Some of the people in this book disown their pets as easily as they would dispose of a pair of pants they no longer liked. They seem to attribute no value to the lives of animals. Others, however, experience tremendous guilt and remorse. Some can no longer provide care for personal or financial reasons. Some are more broken than the animals they are letting go and others have animals taken from them because they are not able to provide for another living thing.
It is not animals whose frailty is exposed in this book as much as it is people. This book shows us what we are capable of, both as betrayers of animals and as saviours. From the willful blindness of the hoarder and the self-serving ignorance of the puppy mill operator to the mentally unstable and intellectually challenged young woman who first loses her dogs to the authorities and then her baby, the characters in this book reveal our species at its weakest.
Simultaneously, however, these same stories show tireless compassion and a ferocious will to protect on the part of shelter workers and volunteers. Sometimes protecting means the pleasure of sending an animal into a loving new home. Sometimes it means the anguish of euthanizing a healthy creature because there is no home.
The author takes the reader not just inside the shelter but inside the private lives of the abusers and the saviours. In both places we find people who face challenges and struggle against fears and weaknesses. Some act out their insecurities against the helpless. Some turn to helping as their way of finding meaning in a world which is often cruel.
From this book I learned that being powerful can be a weakness and that being weak is sometimes what makes you strong. I learned that saviours and villains are sometimes the same people under different circumstances. Above all I learned that voiceless as they are, animals can give us our clearest voices.
Lost and Found (Dogs, Cats, and Everyday Heroes at a Country Animal Shelter) is a singular book that simultaneously challenges and restores the reader’s faith in humanity.
ReplyDeleteLost and Found is a book about the daily trials and tribulations of a country animal shelter. It is a book not just about animals, but also about people and the human psyche.
Before I read this book I couldn’t understand how anyone could abandon or relinquish a pet. Companion animals have no recourse and no social voice. For an owner to make a commitment to an animal and then to renege on that commitment seemed to me to be almost as bad as betraying a little child. Some of the people in this book disown their pets as easily as they would dispose of a pair of pants they no longer liked. They seem to attribute no value to the lives of animals. Others, however, experience tremendous guilt and remorse. Some can no longer provide care for personal or financial reasons. Some are more broken than the animals they are letting go and others have animals taken from them because they are not able to provide for another living thing.
It is not animals whose frailty is exposed in this book as much as it is people. This book shows us what we are capable of, both as betrayers of animals and as saviours. From the willful blindness of the hoarder and the self-serving ignorance of the puppy mill operator to the mentally unstable and intellectually challenged young woman who first loses her dogs to the authorities and then her baby, the characters in this book reveal our species at its weakest.
Simultaneously, however, these same stories show tireless compassion and a ferocious will to protect on the part of shelter workers and volunteers. Sometimes protecting means the pleasure of sending an animal into a loving new home. Sometimes it means the anguish of euthanizing a healthy creature because there is no home.
The author takes the reader not just inside the shelter but inside the private lives of the abusers and the saviours. In both places we find people who face challenges and struggle against fears and weaknesses. Some act out their insecurities against the helpless. Some turn to helping as their way of finding meaning in a world which is often cruel.
From this book I learned that being powerful can be a weakness and that being weak is sometimes what makes you strong. I learned that saviours and villains are sometimes the same people under different circumstances. Above all I learned that voiceless as they are, animals can give us our clearest voices.