I came home today from volunteering at my local shelter and I was honestly shocked at the state of this privately owned, nonprofit, facility. And I'm just...I'm not sure if this place was actually neglecting their animals or if what I saw was just something that's "normal" for shelters these days and my stepping on unfamiliar ground is making me see things as worse than they are. This is what I saw:
- Most, if not all, of their cats were overweight, bordering on obese. Like you've seen unit cats on here where they've got muscle or are just big cats, but these guys were literal balloons and couldn't even bend over to lift their legs to clean their tails...that's how bad it was.
- They all had dirty coats with dry skin and dandruff
- And since I had more of a chance to look at them, instead of just glancing and leaving like I'd done when I first visited the shelter, I noticed that there was a good majority of them, elderly or not, that had severe eye discharge of off colors and nasal discharge that really made me think there was a lot more going on health wise with these poor cats.
- I even saw a few that had so much gunk in their eyes that they couldn't even open them and I'm thinking....if they have volunteers and a vet on site taking care of them, why are they all like this?
- I also overheard a conversation where the shelter manager wanted to put 7 MORE cats into a room that already had about 20 cats in it...and these rooms weren't big in the slightest. All I kept hearing was "well, they have their cat trees, if they want to get away from each other they can go to their spots", which I felt was just the worst cop out thing to say.
I really don't know what to do at this point...is this something I need to report? And how can I go about doing that? This isn't the only shelter in the area, but is the first one I've volunteered for so if I'm just seeing something that's a normal thing in a shelter then...I guess that's that, but this whole thing felt wrong and like some sort of action needed to be taken for the sake of these animals.
[link] [comments]
from Pets https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/awbi51/neglectful_shelter_or_par_for_the_course/
No comments:
Post a Comment