Mouse-eye view of the SPCA

From the mouse that ate the files that recorded the affairs of the animals that lived in the house that the SPCA built.

From my office-cum-storeroom, among the SPCA files, the dry goods and the baby food so kindly donated, I watch.

            This office was built for me in 1963.  For the thirty-six years before that I often had to rough it, but I watched.

            I watched a group of people put together their love of animals, their care and skill and what money they could, and form a living, growing, working idea – this Society.

            I watched them agree and disagree and debate, and settle their differences because animals in need were more important than people’s personalities.

            I watched them build safe, dry shelters for dogs, cats, rabbits, chickens, birds, everyone, every kind, and I have watched these shelters fill and clear and fill again, times beyond counting.

            I have seen lost animals brought here, mindless with panic, ferocious with fear, in their confusion torn between their instinct to hide away and their desperate dependence on people.  Ah, and I have seen the tear-blinding, heaven-high joy of reunion.

            I have seen abandoned dogs stunned with disbelief that all they gave, all their love and trust, meant no more than paint upon a wall, admired for a while then left behind without a thought.

            Some have been left tied to empty houses, trapped by their chains as surely as by a snare.  Some have been taken to unfamiliar places and thrown away like paper, to blow and cry on a strange, unheeding wind.  And I have watched them grow anew the courage and confidence to trust again.

            I have seen the injured carried in, the ears of their minds closed against their screaming pain, thinking every hand must be against them, every road must lead to death.

            I have watched them heal and walk and run again, or watched their eyes close in the vast relief of final sleep brought by the vet who understands when enough is enough.

            I have seen cats, their clean, sleek pride broken by poverty, so scuffed by the careless boots of the world that I – even I – have wept.  And tiny kittens, still blind and deaf to that world, crying and reaching out with incredible, stubborn courage, for the only thing they know – their mother their universe.

            I have watched people too, choked with grief, bringing a  beloved animal they can no longer keep; people with their hearts in their eyes, offering their homes to one or two waifs and yearning to take them all; people, SPCA people, being greeted by name by all the animals at once and greeting them in turn.

            From my office, where I live fatly on the dry goods and baby food so kindly donated and the SPCA files thoughtfully made of our sweet, local paper, I watch the dignitaries and the children, the loving and the careless – I can tell them all – come to this special place and leave with new thoughts in their eyes.

            I watch cats play again, and dogs laugh and birds fly free on mended wings, and I think, what would become of this world if people no longer cared, but shrugged away from the silent cry in the eyes of an animal in need, were too heartless or too afraid to call an animal “little friend”.  I think it would cease to be a world at all and go back to lifeless rock.

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