The First of Many Saturday Mornings

So, I got my service partner locked into place back on January eleventh.  I wanted to work with animals, and I saw a sign in the College of Liberal Arts advising office that Natalie’s Second Chance in Lafayette was looking for volunteers.  I love dogs, and I have a lot of experience working with animals as I worked as a volunteer animal handler at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium for five years.  The flier that was posted in the Liberal Arts advising office advertised that Natalie’s Second Chance was a “no-kill dog shelter,” meaning they do not euthanize any animals to maintain capacity.  This ideology really appealed to me, although I understand why other organizations choose to euthanize animals in order to take in more animals and aide a larger demographic of animals, it still makes me sad to see that happen.  Naturally, due to these specific appeals, Natalie’s Second Chance seemed like the perfect place to volunteer, so I e-mailed them from the Mac-lab in class on January eleventh requesting to volunteer there, and got a response the same day saying they would be happy to have me help out.

This Saturday was the first time I was actually able to make it into Natalie’s Second Chance to work, bringing a friend from my learning community with me to do work.  The people at the shelter told us to come a little before eight o’clock in the morning to walk dogs while the staff cleaned their cages.  We were told that there would be about two hours of work for us in the morning, but that we could stay into the afternoon, until about five o’clock, answering emails and taking the dogs out to play.  Seeing as the buses don’t begin to run until around 8:15 on Saturdays, my friend and I set out from our dorm at 6:45 and made the hour walk into Lafayette, arriving at Natalie’s Second Chance at about 7:50.  The walk was miserable, considering it was about twenty-five degrees with a wind-chill of thirteen degrees and snowing.

Upon arriving, we filled out a volunteer waiver and signed on the dotted line.  We were instructed to walk each dog for about ten minutes, then return them to their clean cage and take another dog out for another ten minutes while they cleaned their cage.  We were to do this with all seven or so dogs in the main office, as well as the eighteen dogs located in the room next door.  I was a little concerned that one of the staff members kept referring to and talking about her “caseworker,” which I assume meant she was doing service after spending time in the penitentiary system.  This is fine, and it’s not as if this made me uncomfortable, it was just more surprising to hear than anything else. Walking the dogs was a bit of an experience, with the dogs we walked ranging from a pit bull named Lilly to a poodle puppy named Bingo, all the dogs just wanted to run and urinate on everything.  I ran with each dog for a while to help drain some of their excess energy, then insisted that they heel and walk with me for a while in order to enforce some sort of structure.  Sadly, all the dogs had diarrhea, and we were required to pick up their poop so that the shelter wouldn’t be fined by the city.  Most of the dogs insisted in pooping in the yard of the church on Sixteenth Street, which made me slightly uncomfortable, but there wasn’t much I could do to prevent them from pooping wherever they pleased.  Picking up canine diarrhea with a plastic grocery bag is a bit tricky, and I had to pick up most of the poop for my friend whenever the dogs he was walking pooped as he proceeded to dry heave each time he tried to pick up.  After spending a summer cleaning up an adolescent cheetah’s diarrhea, I wasn’t really phased by the relatively smaller load of the same stuff the dogs were dishing out.

After walking six dogs between the two of us, three dogs each, a group of ten or so high-schoolers showed up unannounced to volunteer.  Not being able to turn people away, Natalie thanked us for the time we put in and asked us to return at the same time next weekend.  So, forty minutes after we arrived, we were embarking on the thirty minute walk to the CityBus transfer station, where we caught the 4B back to our dorm, where I promptly crawled back in bed and was asleep before my roommate even woke up.  Needless to say, this wasn’t exactly the most rewarding volunteering experience of my life, and I was a bit frustrated that I spent more time walking in the bitter cold to get to the shelter than I did actually working there.  Not exactly what I would call “starting off on the right foot,” but seeing as this is the first time I have volunteered at Natalie’s Second Chance, I am willing to chalk this up to a fluke or blunder of miscommunication between the shelter and its volunteers.  Regardless, I am going to head back next weekend and see what I can do and hope for a more pleasant walk with a little bit more work time to be logged.