-A Day in The Life of an Animal Shelter Worker
"Late on a gray Saturday afternoon in early April, Matt Smith, the manager of the Forsyth County Animal Shelter, suddenly remembers one last thing he needs to do. The skinny stray in kennel No. 11 on the left side. She had come in Monday morning in the back of an animal-control officer's truck. She has been at the shelter for the mandatory five-day wait, and now Smith needs to think about the possibility of more animals coming in. Quickly. The dog's time is up. "Go get her," Smith tells shelter worker Crystal Tilley. She grabs a leash and goes through the heavy metal door of the shelter's tech room. It latches behind her.
Click.
Tilley returns with a small chocolate-and-white dog that dances across the linoleum floor, her tail whipping happily. A syringe filled with liquid, clear and light blue, waits on the exam table. The dog is too thin to be put up for adoption. Her vertebrae poke through her coat like the knuckles of a man's clenched fist. And she is a pit bull. The kennels at the shelter are crowded with pit bulls. This one needs time that the shelter doesn't have today. There are too many other animals, healthy animals, looking for homes. Tilley hooks the dog's leash to a metal clip anchored in the wall. She drops a dog biscuit on the floor and the pit bull gobbles it down. "Thank you, baby," Tilley says, scratching behind the dog's ears. She then sits, Indian-style, on a low metal scale and takes the pit bull in her arms. The dog licks Tilley's face as Smith searches for a vein on the left front paw. "Hey, peanut head," Smith sings to her. Found it. He slips a needle under the dog's skin, pushing it in, then out, then in. "Hey, little girl." "She's so skinny," Tilley says, cradling the dog.Within seconds, the pit bull's legs slip to the floor, followed by her head. Her tongue flops out of her mouth. Her eyes stay open, but by now she is unconscious. Tilley lays her down gently and gets another syringe, this one empty. She sticks it into the dog's heart, a process to let them know for certain that the animal is gone. The syringe twitches in time to the beat of the dog's fading heart.
Until it stops.
Tilley and Smith wait another few seconds and then ease the dog's body into a silvery black plastic bag and put it into a large garbage can outside the tech-room door. It's over in about a minute, the last death of a long six days in a typical week at Forsyth County Animal Control. The unnamed pit bull is the 84th animal to be euthanized this week at the shelter, a place where animals and the decisions about what to do with them, at best, come in as a steady stream and, at worst, as a flood. Behind the animals is a small crew of workers and volunteers who hold on tight to being human and humane, fighting to keep their sanity in such a current of life-and-death choices.
It goes on every day"(Giovanelli, Deaver, Louis).
This is a day in the life of an animal shelter worker.