Visit Pasha's Blog
where he rubs paws
with other animals
and
their writer moms and dads.
or better yet,
buy his book available in all e-book formats as well as - via Amazon - in print:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009ZSPXJG
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/253255
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/pasha-from-animal-shelter-to-a-sheltered-life-inge-h-borg/1113774100
http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/pasha-from-animal-shelter-to-a-sheltered-life
Excerpt - Best Ever
Pasha
After I had adopted my second—and in my
mind definitely last—cat from the
little animal shelter serving the Arkansas lake-side community I had blithely
and blindly moved to from Southern California, I was inevitably recruited to
volunteer there. Ostensibly, just to help socialize the cats (having told them
straight away that I was deathly afraid of dogs).
Not too much
time went by before I found myself cleaning cat cages three times a week.
The
flaming-orange tom had been reported scrounging around a neighborhood for
anything he deemed edible. His owners were supposedly in the process of moving
and had left him to fend for himself. Being a friendly sort of fellow, he was
easily caught and brought to the shelter by the town’s Animal Control Officer.
I had been
wondering about a roomy wire enclosure outside the shelter that had a plaque
affixed to it. It read ‘ACO.’ There was also a small letterbox hooked onto the
wires. For the longest time, I honestly believed that some large literate dog
named Aco must be living there,
perhaps receiving his own fan-mail—although I was a bit puzzled why I never saw
him.
Delighting in
my apparent ignorance when it came to shelter procedures James, the otherwise
dedicated shelter manager, liked to weave long tails into shameless tall tales
for me. Only when staff members and volunteers grinned and twitched their
eyebrows at each other, did it dawn on me that I’d been had once again. Ah, the
burden of ‘being earnest.’
A good laugh
was always welcome though, especially after reading the sad annotations left in
that letterbox by the above-mentioned A.C.O. when he had to lock animals in
that enclosure after hours. ‘Found starving in ditch,’ ‘Hit by car,’ ‘5 puppies
tossed from speeding truck; 3 survived.’
Sometimes it
was worse, sometimes it was better. Always it meant that another little
life—lost, tossed, abandoned or abused—might be saved and eventually given a
loving forever-home.
After the ACO—by now I knew that this was a city employee with a
truck and a trap—delivered the cat, there was the customary bath to de-flea
him. He was messy (the cat, I mean). And he stank (still talking about the
cat). So much so that James placed him in a large cat-cage located out in the
dog kennels. This was no reflection on the dogs, most of which held their
business bravely overnight until they were walked the next morning. It was that
the cavernous room was large enough to handle an unaltered male cat’s odiferous
presence a lot better, whereas he would have blown everyone out of the “cat
motel.”
I diligently
scooped and scrubbed and wondered what they, my far-away city-friends, would
think of all this ‘if they could see me now.’ With the cat cages gleaming and
sweet-smelling again, I checked and swabbed dozens of pointy ears ridding them
of mud and mites, and clipped the very tips off their ‘meat-hooks.’
As I went
about my chores, I could not help but glance through the glass-door that
separated me from the dog kennels and from Cody,
as the approximately year-and-a-half-old tom had been named. The usual waiting
period for an owner to claim an animal is five days. We even put his picture on
the local TV station. Still, no one called or came for him.
Cody was whisked off for the ignoble deed
every shelter animal is subjected to before it can be adopted out. When he
returned from surgery, he thankfully was no longer the pungent tom we had come
to approach with wrinkled noses. Still, to give him room in the larger cage, he
stayed in the inside dog pens from where I could see him while attending to my
chores inside the ‘cat motel.’
Lastly, I had
to clean his cage while he was placed into an adjacent empty one.
That darn cat
never took his eyes off me. They were not quite green and not quite yellow;
they were round, and alert, and reflected light like precious stones set in
orange gold.
“Don’t even
think about it,” I told him. I already had two cats at home.
I named him Pasha.
October 27, 2016 - R.I.P. SWEET PASHA
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