On the first day of 1942, in the midst of another tremendous global struggle, on a train speeding between Ottawa and Washington, Winston Churchill called his staff and reporters into the dining car to make a toast:
In 1897, Francis Pharcellus Church, an editorial writer for the New York Sun, wrote an iconic response to a letter from eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon. Virginia wanted to know if there is a Santa Claus. I hope Mr. Church will forgive me for taking liberties with his work.
I’ve been at the office since the onset of the pandemic. I’m just not a work-from-home guy. I’m an extrovert, and so I get energy from the people around me. I have to tell you, there is no stronger energy than that which comes from the people I work with at the Ottawa Humane Society.
This time of the year, I often think about Christmases when I was a kid. When I was very young, my parents would put up the tree after we went to bed, so Christmas morning was the first time we would see it. We had to wait until everyone was up and had to have breakfast before even going into the room. The anticipation of waiting to see the presents and the Christmas tree appear in the morning was excruciating.
I am sad to write that last weekend, we made the painful decision to put down our sweet little Siamese cat, Gracie. She was almost seventeen. She had kidney problems that we knew about from when we adopted her from the OHS seven years ago, but in the end, it was a relatively rare condition in her salivary glands that made the decision to put her out of her pain clear to us. It was time. But that didn’t make it easy.
Though the OHS is always here for animals in need, we would rather that the vast majority stay in their homes with families that love them. That is why our focus for canines over the last five years has been on behaviour — both for dogs with issues in our care and for dogs in homes in our community. I think this issue has become more important than ever.
Know what you are getting. Puppies and kittens change as they grow up. They get bigger and their personalities can become completely different. With an older pet, you know they aren’t growing and you will already have a good idea of what their personality is like. Adopting a senior takes away the guesswork, and helps ensure a good adoption match.
Recently, I came across an article about a role dogs held in the First World War that I had not heard of before: mercy dogs. Also known as ambulance dogs, or casualty dogs, these canines were trained by Red Cross Societies to find wounded soldiers on the battlefields of trench warfare.
I have written many times that my twin preoccupations throughout the pandemic have been protecting our staff and protecting our ability to care for the animals that truly need us. I have been troubled by the thought that a COVID outbreak on site could mean the unthinkable: that Ottawa’s animals might have nowhere to go.
Over the 133 years since its founding, the Ottawa Humane Society has accumulated a large archive to remember our history. Our most precious artifact is the stunningly beautiful memorial book. The book contains the names of those who remembered the animals in their wills, all written in calligraphy by hand, surrounded by hand-painted drawings of all sorts of animals. The book sits in a glass box in the reception area in the shelter. When I remember, I turn a page daily.
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