🌙🐩Why I almost hit unsubscribe today

Here at the Poodle Farm, our goal is to focus on the good. The positive. The many ways that the people who are part of our program help the animals who are the soul of our program.

We had two of those today.

Two beautiful, wonderful repeat adopters coming back for their next dog.

Repeat adopters make my heart sing. We know them. They know us. And they know we will do everything we can to deliver to them a dog that will sing to their heart.

For Pat and her new love, Pi the Schnauzer, and for Erlene and Jim and their new baby, Gracie, today was the beginning.

I’m so excited for these two new families.

But today, my first full day back after some time away, reality also slammed me in the face.

First there was the email from the frustrated person who wants to relinquish her dog. She assumed simply because we asked her what breed of dog this was and where she was located that meant we would be her salvation.

We can’t.

And in her frustration—and in what I know is her fear of what she may have to do—she turned her anger on our email team.

That’s not right.

Then there were the shelters we work with regularly putting out their euthanasia lists.

They have no choice. Space is limited.

And I confess.

After getting two of those lists in a row, knowing they were just two of the thousands of shelters out there sending the same emails, my hand hovered over the unsubscribe button.

I’m doing all I can.

Why should I keep looking at all these faces I can’t help?

I didn’t unsubscribe. I didn’t unsubscribe because there’s another human being on the end of these emails hoping desperately that her emails will get through. So I didn’t unsubscribe.

But I thought about it.

I’m very human.

Last but not least was the slap on the wrist that was given to a local animal abuser. She took to social media to brag about an early release. She has been allowed to walk away.

And it got me thinking about the difficulty of what we do.

Since we’re hiring, how do I explain this to the young people who come into my office with their smiles and their hopes that they will get a job working with animals?

How do I explain the heartbreak— that the work is hard and the rewards not always obvious. But how do I explain the fact that it is worth it?

The heartbreak is simple.

Those who care the most, those who choose to spend their lives helping animals, are often the very ones who have to make decisions about which animals will die because other humans have failed those same animals.

It’s not fair.

But it is what it is. It is why I have such respect for our shelter workers.

I was speaking with two of our young caregivers tonight who we’re having a particularly tough evening because, sometimes, dogs misbehave. There were complaints that we were crowded. That there jobs were hard.

And we talked about this. We talked about those emails. We talked about all the intake that we do and I shared some of the stories. I need to share more of that with my team. We talked about how many other humans had failed these dogs long before we came along to try to do the best we could with them.

We talked about the fact that if you are going to work in this field, you have to make a decision.

You have to decide whether you can shoulder the heartbreak and whether you can balance that heartbreak with the good. We talked about that you have to be the good human when the other humans have failed them. We watched dogs playing at our feet who had no hope just a few weeks before. Dogs who humans have failed through not caring. That’s not our issue. We care. We may fail them but it’s not from not caring.

Here at the Poodle Farm, we are not having to make euthanasia decisions based on space, and for that I am grateful.

But we say no.

And I know that for every no we say, an animal may die.

When we do say yes, we often stretch our resources. We stretch them as far as they can go—and then some.

We are trying to do what we can do, in every way that we can do it.

But that makes it hard on our people.

I talked to our young caregivers tonight about what keeps me going.

It’s those adopters like the ones we had today.

It’s the donors. Today I signed up another Patron, a wonderful lady who has a Standard Poodle and is at a point in her life where she wants to make a difference. She found us through an internet search when she decided she wanted to make her charitable donations truly mean something for something she cared about deeply. She wanted something where she could actually see her money making a difference.

She chose us.

She’s only two hours away, and I hope she’ll come visit soon.

For her, I am grateful.

For her, I will make the hard decisions.

And I thought about the young woman who sat in my office today with that smile on her face, interviewing for what she hopes will be her dream job.

She’s young. She wants to own her own rescue one day. She wants to find someplace where she can make a difference.

We talked a lot about the hard parts.

She’s coming back tomorrow to work side-by-side with a caregiver and see if this is truly what she wants to do.

I’m not going to lie to her.

I’m going to tell her about the hard parts as well as the parts that bring joy.

The yin and the yang.

The good and the bad.

Yesterday we got to do the good part, we got to say yes twice.

These two souls arrived today.

The little apricot girl, who we’ve named Ava, was abandoned. Once her people found out she was at the animal shelter, they said, essentially, fine. Keep her.

The little boy, whose name is now Andrew, was a stray.

Poodles never used to be found as strays.

Now it’s common.

Two more faces. Two more lives we didn’t know anything about yesterday. Two more dogs who needed someone to say yes.

Where people failed them, we stepped in.

And we will do all we can to do better by them.

That is the balance.

That is why we keep going.

Tonight’s post isn’t asking for pity.

It’s a post of thanks.

Thank you for all the yeses we get to say.

Thank you for helping make those yeses possible.

And thank you for understanding that we make mistakes.

Sometimes we don’t contact you as much as we should. Sometimes we don’t update as much as we should. Sometimes we simply don’t get everything right.

But it all comes from a place where CPR is trying to be the best we can be, every single day.

And knowing that, no matter how hard we try, some days we will fail.

But we will get back up.

If you’ll be there to help us.

For more information on our Patrons program, visit our Link at

Poodle Patrons

or drop me an email here on Substack or at donna@carolinapoodlerescue.org. I would be glad to tell you more about it.

We do what we do only because of you🐾❤️