“Help, I’m Alive: An Article of Convenient Inconvenience” by RVA
“I tremble, they’re gonna eat me alive. If I stumble, they’re gonna eat me alive. Can you hear my heart beating like a hammer, beating like a hammer? Help, I’m alive, my heart keeps beating like a hammer.”
These are the opening lyrics to the band Metric’s song, “Help, I’m Alive”. As I listen to this song, I can’t help but imagine a doomed being whose existence is repeatedly ignored, denied by those who hear the calls for help but act deaf, by those who can see the turmoil but act blind. All around us are tales of woe and desperation yet too many of us have trained ourselves to become immune from hearing these cries for help simply because it’s more convenient to live ignorant. That is fine though, if that’s how you want to live your life that is. We live in a world that is ruled by paranoia and fear of liability and we foolishly remedy these “burdens” by indulging in luxuries that we sign our lives away for. Sure, if you work hard enough, you’ve earned the right to indulge and splurge, but what about those can’t afford those luxuries no matter how much they work.
Out of the many, many cases of the impoverished and unprivileged, I speak of the many abandoned animals for the sake of briefness for this article. Too often are pets bought by people only to become unwanted for the sake of alleviating the burden of liability. Chihuahuas are very popular luxury dogs, but they make up a major stray population in the state of California . Pets our often seen as accessories and like accessories, we can forget them whenever it suits us. Sure, there are “legitimate” reasons for relinquishing a pet. Some of the more “popular” reasons are because the owner is moving and can’t take the pet, the cost of pet maintenance is too high, or there is simply no time for pets anymore. Roughly thirty percent of the animals in animal shelters were bought in by owners while about fifty percent were caught on the streets. Animals that have been abandoned will probably end up in an animal shelter, if they don’t die on the streets first. Most of us rest easier with that assumption. The fact is, many animal shelters are overpopulated.
In 1994, The National Council on Pet Population Study and Policy (NCPPSP) started sending out survey cards to animal shelters all over in an effort to get accurate statistics of the animals that make up these shelters. This process halted in 1997, however, because of low responses from the shelters. The information that was gathered within that time frame showed a steady rise in abandoned or relinquished animals being sheltered. In 1994, there was an overall count of 3,780, 518 animals entering shelters and in 1997 that number grew to 4,336,244. In 1994, 2.3 percent of animals we adopted and in 1997, that percentage only grew by 1.6 percent. A steady 10 percent of animals were returned to their owners in from 1994 through 1997 while an estimate of 60 percent of animals were euthanized throughout those same years. Though these numbers may be out dated, they still reflect a possible trend. We will soon be entering 2011, if there was another attempt to get accurate enough numbers of abandoned animals, it is probably unfortunately safe to assume that more animals have been put down and it will only keep growing.
Think about it, if more animals are being put into shelters and less continue to be adopted, more will have to be euthanized. Granted, that some of the animals are too sick and are put down for humanitarian reasons, but our greed and selfishness is growing and it is written on the wall. If you have to move and can’t take the pet with you, is it really hard to find a family member or friend to take in that pet? Is it so hard to spend less on a pack of beer or designer clothing just so you can have enough for Kibbles and Bits? If you don’t have time for a pet, why bother getting one? Our hearts may melt to the cute little store bought puppies and kittens but when they get older and get in the way of those $400 sunglasses do we quickly find them less cute and more prone to neglect and maybe even abuse them let alone abandon them. It’s bad enough we neglect goodwill towards our fellow man, but must we continue to go deaf upon the cries of hungry kittens or to the whimpering of a lonely dog?
I am writing this article because a friend of mine is taking care of the twenty-seven cats that need to find homes before they are evicted from a home whom they were sharing with a person who can legally no-longer be around to take care of them. The probability that most of these cats, if the statistics I have given above is an indicator, will end up at an animal shelter where there is at least a 60 percent likelihood that they will be put down to convenience a society that is inconvenienced by real compassion and liability. If you can search your soul and reset your mind away from the superficial and fickleness to adopt one of these cats or any abandoned animal for that matter, please do so. You can email about the cats at hashpipe616@yahoo.com. The cats have been spayed and neutered. If you wish to adopt an animal from a shelter, please lookup your nearest shelter. Our world keeps on getting faster, the technology and luxuries more advanced and pricier as the amount of dept in our societies get deeper, drowning out the cries for help by those less fortunate. What will be the new humanitarian trend be as we continue to involve ourselves with Jersey Shore or the latest iPod update? Everything that is key, isn’t always golden.
