Less Think, More Do
On lurchers, longing, and the uncomfortable dissonance of doing what little good you can
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Izzie — a lurcher whose lean white body is blotted with sandy speckles — lays her head softly on my shoulder. It’s a deliberate, careful movement and I’m shocked by it, as though a stranger has pulled me into the intimacy of an embrace. I suppose that’s exactly what’s happening. I’ve bent down to refill her water bowl, the cold air of this Australian winter morning sparking and fretting against the exposed skin of my hands. It’s embarrassing to admit that I’m truly not sure what to do . Izzie’s sparse, head, shaped like a desert fossil, rests there on my shoulder, immobile. A sigh moves through her long form, snuffling out through her damp grey-pink nose. It makes its way past my ear en route to whatever its seeking, and it seems that some tendril of Izzie’s feeling about her life is emitted with the noise. Some lament, or desperation. Some longing for connection.
And then I think ‘Izzie is a dog, not emotionally tortured philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Jesus fucking Christ.’
She’s been here every time I’ve come in for the last three weeks. She knows me by now, doing a sort of merry, undignified little wiggle when I pass her kennel. When I signed up to volunteer at the animal shelter a few months back, the orientation session was impressively full. Mostly all women ranging from university student age to past retirement. Everyone wanted to volunteer with the cats, and I get it. I went there first for the cats too. I like a cat. Their soft, liquid, leonine elusiveness just appeals to me. Their dignified, self-cleaning fastidious primness. Their neat little bodies occupying neat little spaces. Their good sense to defecate in the designated area. Cats’ expressions suggest they don’t need me, and I can respect that kind of frankness in any living creature.
These particular cats — most of whom are in the shelter looking for new homes — live in dedicated enclosures inside a heated bungalow. They have access to a catio outside during the warm winter afternoons. As I walk past, a small, chunky guy wearing a tuxedo of fur tries to woo me through the wire mesh of the catio. He has the manner of someone who has just put down the martini he was drinking moments before. He flops sluttily onto his back, and two young girls behind me emit an ‘awwww!’ so high pitched that the dogs in the kennels across the way bark in reply. The cats are, for obvious reasons, easier to rehome than their canine neighbours. Less work. Less noise. Less pissing themselves in excitement at the sight of you. Less like the centre of a venn diagram where intransigent toddler on cocaine meets terrifyingly enthusiastic stalker.
‘We need a kennel cleaner on Thursdays’, the woman running the orientation session declared. ‘Someone has just quit and we are pretty stuck. Anyone want to do it?’ Nobody seemed to want to do it. I get why. It’s a cold, wet, outdoor job and nobody anywhere in the vicinity is wearing a tuxedo. There’s a significant volume of dog turds involved, and they vary in viscosity. It’s the indignity of biological waste and the meaty muck of morning feeding and the stiff, stinging, swollen hands you get when you’re hosing shite off walls and it’s one degree celsius outside. Not a pleasant job.
Hating myself for hating myself, I volunteered. Because yes, I went there to sign up for light, dry, warm work and to feel better about myself. But unsurprisingly, the job they most needed to fill was not the one that felt nicest to do. In classic hot guy form, the tuxedo cat was already getting the phone numbers of the younger girls behind me. ‘That guy doesn’t need me’, I thought, not for the first time in my life.
I saw my own selfishness, so I volunteered to clean the kennels even though I don’t really have any experience with dogs. I’m a bit unsure around them, these (potentially big) goofy beasts whose emotions seem so perpetually unmediated. Luckily, in the context of volunteering at an animal shelter, the most valuable quality in a person appears to be willingness to turn up and give whatever is needed a go. Nothing is ever optimal. It’s a bunch of well intended, underfunded people pushing back a tide. There’s always a door with a broken hinge or a malfunctioning washing machine or a blocked drain that someone is working to fix. Even if you’re a bit soft and scatterbrained and doubting your own utility, they’ll find a job for you and put you to work. Luckily for me, they’re not looking for ideal people — just people.
I’m short. The long curve of Izzie’s back is at the height of my hip. She feels bigger than I am in ways that matter. Her long maw could take a chunk from me if she were inclined that way, but she is mellowness itself. I wonder what it must be like to possess such physical power and not to use it. Her speed, she does use. She laps the grassy exercise yard like a pale blur, the energy she can’t expend inside her kennel bursting forth in a frenzy, like revelation or prayer. Running might be a religious experience for a dog. Izzie is used to me now. On Thursday mornings, I clean her kennel and get her fresh bedding and we spend time being quiet together before one of the volunteer walkers comes by to take her out on her constitutional.
I describe what I’m doing as I do it — swapping out grubby old toys for fresh ones, hosing down the floor and drying it off. It doesn’t matter what I’m saying — Izzie just likes a gentle tone and a conversation. She likes to stand resting her weight against mine, and to feel the warmth of someone next to her. Different dogs need different things. The teenagers jump on you, wild with excess energy and frustration. They want to tell you whatever they just read about Marxism and play music with provocative lyrics. They want to play tug of war.
The puppies don’t know what they need — just that they need it desperately and this very moment. Last week one sunk his knifey little nub-teeth into my calf, his eyes rolling back in primordial ecstasy. I waited for the frenzy to wear itself out and placed him gently in a crate before scrubbing the floors. They tell us to teach the puppies to sit on command and run our hands gently under their collars and over their little potato bellies to get them used to socialising and positive interactions with humans. It helps them to find a home quicker. The older dogs are the saddest, and I visit them and treat them with the respect of relative elders (even though I’m usually decades older than they are). I give them compliments and I tell them they’re good and I nurse an intense hope that I won’t see them next week. They deserve a warm, peaceful spot to snooze in, and a touch of the complacency we’ve all earned toward the end of a life of putting up with everyone else’s bullshit.
When I go in and a dog is gone, it’s the closest thing to contentment that I feel through the whole experience. I don’t trust the feeling. I wonder why I’m doing this. It’s cold, and wet, and physically challenging. It does not smell good. It’s sad. I watch silently as the dogs I become attached to — like Molly, a big, tawny-russet lady who looks like a Japanese mastiff — are not chosen. She’s got big dinner-plate paws and, having been used for breeding in her life before, amasses a pile of stuffed toy puppies, over whom she feels protective, in her bedding. Having had a hard time, like many of these creatures who end up with nobody to care for them, she’s nervous and vocal, and emits big, resonant barks when she’s caught off guard. Week after week, she remains at the shelter.
In the time I spend with these animals, I’m not volunteering at the local hospice or raising money for women in Sudan or fostering children who need parents. I’m not devoting my time to any other of an infinite number of causes, any one of which works to diminish suffering in the world. I’m cleaning up puppy diarrhoea and arranging fresh, warm bedding so that an animal nobody could take care of doesn’t have to sleep in the cold and stand in its own waste. When I take the bus home after my shift, I stink. Today, I was covered in puppy shit, because I’d forgotten to take a clean pair of trousers to change into. ‘They’re on meds so they’ve got pretty bad diarrhoea’, the shelter worker told me, handing me some gloves. ‘So, you know… don’t touch your eyes or… anything’. ‘Hokay’, I reply, curling into a ball internally. I caught a whiff of myself on the bus home and gagged a little. Even on a good day, I smell like dog. Intensely, richly of dog. I try not to sit near anyone else as I work to manage my own rising feeling of disgust.
I do this each week and while I do it, I’m not doing something else, and while the experience is good for both me and the animals, I often feel downcast as I make my way home. We could all do more, and better. I think about what I’m not doing, and feel a bit like these mornings with the hose and the endless poo and the time spent in the company of creatures who need it might be futile.
Sometimes the disincentive against doing what you can is how deeply uncomfortable and inadequate it feels. The way that it forces you to confront the reality that you could always do more, or better. If you don’t wade into that morass, resigning suffering to some theoretical realm, pushing it as far from you as possible, then you don’t have to meet that reality. You don’t have to be confronted by the ways you fail to look it in the eye. You don’t have to figure out what to do with the painful ideas and feelings that generates, dangling from you like useless limbs.
I have to shut the kennel door when I’m finished. I lock it and I leave a sad, lonely animal in there, staring balefully at me. ‘I hope I don’t see you next time’, I say gently into their furred pates before I leave, despite what is presumably their limited English. When I go back in the next time and find that a dog has been adopted into a new family, I feel a flicker of something softly rearranging inside me. I’m not entirely sure what to name it — it feels for a second like something profoundly important, because a harmless, vulnerable creature has received what it needs most in a world not guaranteed to go that way — but it also feels miniscule. Like trying to pinch an artery shut when you’re knee-deep in blood. Because this is only one tiny life — invisible to almost everyone— and it’s not even a human one. Yet it’s a whole life. Rerouted. Saved, hopefully. A consciousness retrieved from suffering and isolation.
And I wonder if it’s selfish of me to take that feeling and swallow it whole to fuel me through the sadder, smellier aspects of the time I spend with these animals. I consume it greedily to sustain myself through the physical and emotional discomfort of the time when I lock myself in there with them and see what they see. I am distracted by my discomfort and my need even as I work to meet the needs of the animals. The entire experience is dissonance.
I’m not great with dogs, really. I’m probably naturally better suited to being socially rejected by cats in a preheated bungalow. There are people who can do what I’m doing for a few hours each week better, faster, more efficiently than I can. People who are more experienced and feel less conscious of the more disgusting aspects of the work. People who don’t meet a strange, sad dog in objective need with the awkwardness of someone being introduced to a random colleague’s spouse at a work function. People who can tell the difference between Izzie the lurcher and Arthur Schopenhauer.
I don’t know what to do with these feelings apart from allow them to exist while I scoop poo and sneeze dog bed smell from my nose and try to adjust to the noise of incessant barking. While I try not to focus on the streak of crap drying into the weave of my jeans. ‘I know — I’m overthinking it’, I tell Izzie, who blinks passively, silently up at me, remaining a lurcher who cannot resolve my dissonance for me. She grabs a ball and drops it at my feet (something Schopenhauer would simply never have done).
‘You’re right’, I tell her. ‘Less think, more do’. I toss her the ball.
AN UPDATE FOR ANYONE INTERESTED WHO MADE IT THIS FAR:
I WENT IN THIS MORNING TO FIND IZZIE’S KENNEL EMPTY.
SHE’S FOUND HER FAMILY, AND GONE HOME.
I read this while walking my own two rescues today and I will tell you that your work gives back and manifests multitudes because it’s not only healing to the dogs but to the people the dogs end up with. You helped Izzie build up trust and love and that made her be a better companion for her new family. And that brings them even more joy. It’s incredibly hard rescuing a dog and not knowing where they’ve been and what trauma they’ve experienced. But every act of kindness that have experienced makes it all the better. And then they bring just a lifetime of joy - often life-saving joy to the people they live with. And you contributed that. So maybe you’re not directly feeding children dying of famine. But you are doing something that is crucial even if it doesn’t feel like it. At least that is how my dogs have been for me. So thank you, truly. You are a compassionate and feeling and good person. You may have felt like you were taking an “easy” route at first even though it ended up being hard and stinky (and you’re human so that’s fine whatever!) but you’re still doing something incredibly important.
I can’t tell you how much I admire you doing this. I’m an absolute dog nut, fond of cats too mind but mainly dogs. My own dog just died so everything sets me off, but this was so beautifully written. I’m so glad Izzie found a home.