Service Learning - Week Three

The weather yesterday was amazing – perfect for volunteering at the humane society. I spent the afternoon outside letting the puppies run around in the exercise yard. They all had so much energy! Some of the smallest ones were the most fun though; they seemed to have just discovered that they had teeth. There was one little cream colored puppy, a lab maybe, that just had to chew on everything. And was he ever excited when he discovered the tongue of my sneaker! He just yanked and tugged as hard as he could, to no avail of course, considering he only weighed about two pounds. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) the husky mix that I love so much was not adopted since last week. He’s still sitting in the puppy room, rapidly outgrowing his cage. Hopefully, he will be adopted before he gets sick. One of the other dogs got a little too excited though when I carried him outside – I now know what it is like to have an animal pee on me – a life experience to be sure. After I got done playing with puppies, my supervisor asked me to clean the exercise yard. This process consisted of a garden hose and a special bottle of bleach water that attached to the hose. In all, it took four bottles to completely soak the small yard. One of the other workers was surprised by what I was doing and by how much bleach I was using until he asked whose idea it was for me to clean the yard, after which he figured he should have known. Now you may be wondering “Why on earth would you hose down a yard with bleach?” Good question. According to Dictionary.com parvo is “a highly contagious, often fatal viral disease of dogs, characterized by vomiting, severe diarrhea, and depression and accompanied by high fever and loss of appetite.” I was asked to soak the yard in order to kill diseases, mainly parvo, so that the other dogs would not become infected – in essence, clean the yard with bleach to help save lives.

Service Learning Journal - Week Two

I discovered that I made the right choice about where to volunteer. I choose the humane society, not only because I love animals, but also because I figured that working with animals would be far superior to working primarily with other people. Turns out, that at least a few, if not most, of the other people who work at the animal shelter feel the same way. Case in point, last week I found a great little poodle there and I was really hoping that a nice family would adopt him. This week when I went in he was still here, only by then he had gotten ill, maybe stress, maybe something worse, not sure. So I had only been there a short time when a lady, and her somewhat annoying children came in asking about the poodle. My supervisor explained that he was sick, and stated numerous times that by law the dog must be neutered. At first, the lady agreed to have him neutered. By the time they got to the front counter to officially adopt the dog, she had a slightly different story. She said that it just didn’t seem right to have a dog fixed, in fact, she only got her other dog fixed because it got old. At this point, my supervisor started to show part of how upset she was by explaining to the lady that what was actually wrong was having to destroy perfectly fine animals every day since people don’t always get their pets spayed or neutered. One could tell that she was biting her tongue during this exchange. After the lady left with the poodle my supervisor pretty much exploded, the gist of which was that she was really sick of people. About the organization itself, I learned that when they get animals in they keep them separate for at least a week before they can go up for adoption. Also, I found out what happens when animals get diseases – they have to be destroyed immediately, and then their cage(s) is completely sanitized.

Service Learning Journal - Week One

I started my volunteer work on Tuesday at the Joplin Humane Society. I found it quite interesting what happened when I was introduced to the staff. My supervisor would say, "This is Jennifer; she’s a volunteer." Normal enough, right? Yes, until the response of "phew" or "Oh, good!" came. Then later while I was helping one of the ladies with the puppies, she said that it was up to me what I did next, she wasn’t going to make me do anything - I could either clean puppy cages (which I did a little later that afternoon) or I could take a puppy outside to play with (which I did first, before cleaning the cages). She said that they don’t really like to make volunteers do real work, that’s reserved for the community service people. I got the very strong impression that they had not had very good experiences with people that the courts sent over. Though for the most part everyone that works there seemed like really nice, fun people. And it may prove to be more interesting since another girl started there the same day I did as a volunteer, so I have a peer with whom to compare insights. I had a lot of fun helping out there this week. I look forward to going back next Tuesday. Maybe then I’ll have more insight into the culture of the organization.