Noé Állatotthon Alapítvány

Behind the scene
2012.07.05.

I’m writing this to let you see what we do every day. It’s not because I want to impress you, not even for commendation. The main goal is to let you feel what we feel or how we see things. Education is very important for us so here is a „lesson”. While you are reading this, please try to think about: what would you do? What would you feel? How would you react?

I can see the visitors every week: they come to the Animal Shelter – first they are a bit worried, a bit scared, they have that ’bad feeling’ – and then they leave us with huge smiles on their faces. Of course we are happy about thais because it means we do well what we do. But what do we exactly do?

No matter how you look at that, saving animals is not a piece of cake. Everybody thinks this at the first time. Frankly, I thought the same at the beginning. We come over here, go for a walk with the animals, stroke them, the animals are happy, we are a little bit happy too and we calm down because this place makes you relaxed and forgot your everyday problems. After a while we come more often, we have our own favourites.

We start to have our daily routine and a companionship who we work with and then we realize that we go home later and later every time. In the meantime we experience a lot: good things but sadly bad things as well. Sometime we think: things couldn’t be worse – then we realize that they could…and they will. We won’t give up as they don’t give up either and they need us. So we keep doing…

We experience and sometimes we are dissapointed, they come together. We learn the most important lessons and we keep doing… or not. The first and most important lesson we learn very soon is that ’We can’t save everybody!”. It’s impossible. The walls are not from rubber, the sources are limited, so are the possibilities. We experience that we have to fight for every single forint, that sometimes the only reason why an animal can get the treatment it needs is the wets’ kindliness and conscientiousness. We understand that we are responsible for those who are on the inner side of the gate, we are primarily for them, we do it because of them so they can start a new life and we can give a chance for a new one. And the payment is when one of them finds a new home and we can see it walking away with its new family. We are a bit sad because we have to say good bye but on the other hand we are happy because we did it, again! We gave a chance for a better life and now it has got it.

Unfortunately it happens that no matter how much we want we can’t give it to someone. That’s when we learn the second lesson: ’You have to accept that it’s over!’ The hardest thing on Earth is to accept that we failed. We fight for a life but we can’t save it and we have to accept that death is part of life. It happens that we can’t help, sometimes we don’t arrive there in time and sometimes the animal simply gives up and no matter what we do it doesn’t help. In this case we can’t do anything. If it wants to go we have to respect its will and have to let it go. The most of what we can do is to be with the animal until it’s last breath. When it goes across the bridge we hope that a better life can be found over there… or that the bridge exists at all. Sometimes the situation is even more complicated as we have to decide: life or death. I don’t think that somthing could be harder than this. There are so many questions: Am I sure? Is it really what the animal wants? Have I done everything? Isn’t there an other way? But how could you be sure in this? We couldn’t. It’s a very hard and painful decision about a life. We have to make sure that there are no other options and we have to face with tha fact that this is better for the animal so it won’t suffer anymore and it can have its dignity.

This decision might be difficult because we have seen several miracles. One of the best moment is when we first realise: ’However, there are miracles!’ There are, there have been and probably there will be cases when everybody else gave up but we kept fighting. Even when the wet’s first reaction was: it’s far gone. Not because it was easier or they wanted that but because they didn’t think that there would be hope. This is when we have to make our decision. By now we have proved that just because we kept trying and we gave in everything we won. When it happens we are proud of that little Hero who showed us what it is capable of and yes, we are a little bit proud of ourselves as well becuse we didn’t give up. When it happens we get our faith back a little bit and we turn to the next miracle with hope.

I’m full of emotions right now but I think it works like this. I hope that you could think it through and feel what we feel. Of course there are a lot of other things that come with this ’profession’ and a lot of them are good but it’s important to know the dark side of it too. It’s important to know that every day brings a newer struggle and that saving animals is not only smile and happiness. Well, it is, a little bit…

Andi