Volunteering... animal shelter.

Wildlife shelters are wierd.

I say this not because I consider it odd to want to save animals that have become injured by modern society and thereafter retard the species evolution by returning these injured animals to the wild. As a general rule, I do not believe that animal shelters do retard evolution for two major reasons:

1) In the UK, most species handled are either city-thriving species that have already adapted to modern life or at such low numbers that as many animals as possible have to be kept going, regardless of genetic quality just to prevent Allee* effects.

2) The bulk of animals treated in these animal shelters are birds and mammals, which are indisputably able to learn from their own mistakes and - in many cases - have also been proven capable of learning from the mistakes of others. Thus Action A, if followed by pain and stress, will be avoided in the future even if the animal survives.

Be that as it may, Wildlife shelters are awash with paradoxes:

1) Human hospitals smell of two things (in my experience) - Disinfectant and bodily fluids, even on non-surgical . With all the herring-gulls, ducks, pigeons and hedgehogs distributing their business as far and wide as possible, you'd expect that the predominant smells in the shelter would be similar. But instead, it smells of disinfectant and food (as far as you can call the cat-food that hedgehogs seem to love above all else "food").

2) When you open a cage, there is no way of saying how you'll feel after you've cleaned it, weighed the resident and closed the door. A mangy little hedgehog with no fur can be happy and hyper and quite definitely planning on living, and you'll leave (and scrub your hands) with a huge smile on your face from the adorable little zombie... while a larger hedgehog with a very positive history can have suddenly decided not to drink and losing weight at a rate of knots, and you feel like you're going to throw up just seeing it fade.

3) When someone walks through the door with a box, you're heart goes up and down at the same time. You can't wait to see this new and exciting animal, but then, of course, this new and exciting animal has to have been injured in some way (most probably by idiots with guns and/or dogs).

4) You can be the shallowest, least philosophical git on the surface of the planet (me) and you'll still feel obliged to find flowery euphemisms for death afterwards.


It's made me feel really good and really awful at the same time.


I conclude - it's wierd.

I plan to go again. 





*To put it simply, Allee effects come in when organisms cross a critical threshold and, although they are present throughout a large environment, their chances of finding a mate before they get eaten/expire are effectively nil, so the population rapidly dwindles and disappears