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.