One hot summer day many years ago, I pulled up to work at the Michigan Humane Society in Detroit and there was a cardboard box already waiting for me at the front door. I looked inside the box and found four neonatal kittens without their mother. The kittens were so young they would immediately need a foster parent to bottle-feed them every few hours. If I didn’t find a foster home in the next couple of hours, the kittens would have to be euthanized.
I went inside the shelter and headed to my office. Before I could even put my things down and grab a sip of coffee, an animal evaluator was running up behind me, telling me we were on over-load. Almost every cage was full and we needed to clear out space for more animals that would be coming in that day, as our average intake is about fifty animals per day. So the evaluator and I walked through the shelter and picked animals to be euthanized. Some had been there awhile (meaning two weeks) and we picked those first. The first dog I held in the euthanasia room was licking me as we put her to sleep. As I wiped tears away from my eyes, I realized we were officially open so I needed to go unlock the front door and make sure our phones were on.
Immediately when I turned on the phones, our switchboard started lighting up with calls. The first call came from a man who was on his way to work and he saw a duck get hit by a car. The man explained that a duck was walking with her ducklings and all the ducklings fell into a sewer grate. The duck started frantically flapping around trying to get her babies, and that’s when she got struck and killed by a car. The man was wondering if we could come save the ducklings that were now stuck in the sewer. I paged for one of our emergency rescue drivers to go rescue the ducklings.