Will any man despise me? Let him see to it. But I will see to it that I may not be found doing or saying anything that deserves to be despised.
Marcus Aurelius
I have had a terrible Monday.
On one side I have spent most of the day trying to find, in vain, enough number of foster homes to accommodate the 12 cats dumped onto our clinic on Saturday night. Our community in Turkey, remains as unresponsive as it ever was, so no surprise there. The hundreds of people that we helped in the past simply looked away. Lesson learned.
On the other hand I am completely overrun by an asphixiating sense of guilt about my blog post of yesterday.
On Saturday night a tearful woman called me to ask for help dealing with her 12 cats. She had just split with her boyfriend and she couldn’t see a way out, for herself or for any of her animals.
I immediately accepted, but my help came with a price. That price was to have to endure one of the hardest and harshest posts I have ever written. A post in which I completely unleashed the frustration created in me by the acceptance of a responsibility far beyond what I can humanly carry.
Over my shoulders, rests now the future of 12 lives, all of them dumped onto me in a completely unexpected way. I was not ready for this. We don’t have enough foster homes, none of the animals is ready (permission-wise) to fly to a foreign family, the kittens are too young to be separated from their mother, it’s a complete disaster, a painful slap on the face for which I cannot turn away.
But my frustration and anger doesn’t grant me license to kill… and that is precisely what I did when I wrote the following uninspired phrase:
By that point my heart beat had slowed down to a halt and my mind had wondered to an imaginary peaceful place where people like that girl are drowned at birth.
All the anger and frustration in the world does not justify these words. Granted, I didn’t give out the name of the person publicly, but my words were designed to hurt, to injure, to maim. I’m better than that.
I don’t wish that girl/woman any harm. As hurt and overwhelmed as I am I cannot allow anger to obscure my judgement.
For this, I want to apologize, not only to the girl whose cats I rescued, but to anyone that may have felt let down by my outburst of rage.
Let’s Adopt! is not just another virtual community. This blog is not just another dog blog. This blog represents everything I hold dear and it is at the core of a worldwide community of extraordinary people.
I cannot let all those people down. I cannot betray the trust confided by our readers and members by launching into cheapshots designed to hurt an individual person whose only fault was to be uneducated in matters of animal welfare and to love animals a bit too much. If I am going to preach responsibility and compassion I need to start by showing fairness.
They kill them with love… by failing to neuter their pets animal lovers are condemning thousands of animals to early deaths in kill shelters or dumping grounds. A girl in Istanbul learned that painful lesson yesterday, a lesson she won’t ever be able to forget. As for me? I’m going to have to find a way to secure the future of all those animals.
Will I have to do this alone or will our Turkish friends step forward and offer their help? We’ll see… at this stage I truly have no hope.
But for now please accept my apology for my inexcusable behavior yesterday. I will do my best to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
viktor@myletsadopt.com.