Calhouns Can(n)ons

How Much Is That Deja Vu Doggie In The Window?

Excellent report by Bob Cuddy in today's Tribune on the recently released Humane Society's report on our local animal shelter. The report itself is at the Tribune's website at www.sanluisobispo.com

If you are interested in critters or curious about the kerfluffle at DAS, I hope you'll read it. It's long but very, very thorough. And like all such well thought-out reports that outline detailed ways to solve problems, the solutions come down to Mo' Money. Better organization, yes, better managment skills and/or clearer lines of authority, better proceedures, yes. But so many of DAS's problems still come down to Mo' Money.

Mo' Money to hire a full time Humane Educator. Hire a full time Volunteer Staff Cordinator (vital since, as important as volunteers are, poorly trained or poorly supervised and/or run-amok volunteers can often cause serious problems to any organization. And animal shelter volunteers are particularly vulnerable to run-amokness since the temperament of "helpers" is to "help." Which too often runs athwart of the often harsh reality of a society that treats its companion animals like throw-away garbage.) Mo' Money to implement more and better training. And so forth.

All of the wonderful recommendations take time and time is money. The Supervisors will be considering this report at their regular BOS meeting on August 26. If you're at all interested in this topic (and as a taxpayer, you should be) you might want to read the report and let your Supervisor know what your wishes on this matter are.

One thing has been clear to me for a long time. Most people don't understand that when it comes to dealing with animal issues, we pay at the front end or we pay at the back end. Either way we pay. The choice is, do we invest more in the front-in programs that have a chance at reducing the problem over time so the costs (and the suffering) can slowly be reduced? Or continue with the same old same old, maintain the level of misery and then pay pots to kill and haul off all the dead unwanted animals?

And Now, Your Saturday Poem

By Nature

As if hopefulness
Were a kind of natural
Right instead of a

Sort of malady
Most incident to the mind,
We have looked upward

And then down again,
Looked under, and behind, for
Some acknowledgement

Of what it is we
Act as if we'd been promised.
The jack o'lantern

Grin of sunrise, noon's
Reasonable demeanor,
Night's apparently

Loving hand drawing
Her dark curtain between us
And what will come next --

These are what we get.
Having by nature both to
Take it and leave it.

The cold sky, having
Come in time to imitate
Our moods, will giggle

Or frown, as it will,
But without the convictions
We believe we have;

The relenting snow
Will yield to the gray green dark
Surface of the land;

The unforgiving
Land will leave us nothing much
To ground our hopes in;

And the water, wide
With Possibility and
With desperation

At once, can take back
What was never more than our
Borrowed buoyancy.

-- John Hollander