Sue Brooks August 16th, 2014
My letter to the Councillors sent on Wednesday arvo has resulted in not one response so far. I emailed Cr Garland to check it had been received and he says yes. My letter to the Councillors is my previous post. I await the response that Cr Garland tells me he will send.
I have been told that the reason that the dogs are being killed at the pound is because it is too expensive to take them to the vet! To say I am incredulous is an understatement!
Time for some background. I took over as President of Fraser Coast Pet Warriors in 2010 after being asked by the then President, Ms Marie Barnes, to step in to try and save the organisation from collapsing.
On being elected as President, together with a brand new committee, we discovered how poorly the organisation had been managed. We fixed most things quite quickly. We made sure all monies received were properly accounted for. We made sure every animal we saved was desexed and received all the vet care it required. We kept absolutely detailed records. Council only had to ring me and within minutes I could provide them with accurate details of every pet we had or had adopted. Dates of desexing, dates of vaccinations etc, etc. But we were not perfect. I am hopeless at asking for help so we didn’t solicit donations. We had times when our web site was not up to date. We could have done lots of things better. But we saved heaps of pets… And failed to save heaps more!
For approx 2 years I visited the pound usually more than once a week. I claimed dogs that I should have left behind and probably didn’t claim dogs that I should have. To walk the line of cages and more or less decide who lived and who probably didn’t is not a job I ever imagined I would do. But I did! Running a rescue is extremely hard work and is heart breaking.
Foster carers require support and help. Pets have to be moved at short notice. Homes have to be found. Some dogs had a queue of people wanting them and the awful process of deciding who would be the successful applicant was heart wrenching. But not quite as heart wrenching as the dogs that nobody wanted. The dogs that stayed with us week after week after week! Did we ever give up? There were several times we were a whisker away from deciding to euthanise but guess what. Something always happened to stop us. In my time at Pet Warriors we did not ever kill one dog.
But one day we rescued a litter of tiny kittens. One little boy in this litter was paralysed and had no bowel or bladder control. He came home with me and we spent a lovely night with him. The next day I knew what the vet would say. I left the vet alone. But a piece of my heart stayed behind.
In those 2 years I knew that the pound at Hervey Bay was run reasonably well. There were many problems but the Compliance Staff did the best job that they could under very difficult conditions that I have detailed previously.
Now I find that this Council is so stingy that they ‘cannot afford’ to take the pets to the vet to be euthanised. To imagine that they are killing animals at the pound within sight of the other pets there absolutely sickens me.
Please help. Ask the Councillors to better fund our Pound. It is as simple as that!
