Animal welfare is my life but it's also making me lose my mind.

Tag: Animal Control

  • The Myth About No-Kill Shelters

    The Myth About No-Kill Shelters

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    Jessica Kooistra
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    You find a lost dog in your neighborhood and ask friends for advice on what to do next. One person tells you to bring it to the animal shelter, another tells you absolutely not, they ‘will just kill it’. You contact a local rescue that is known to take dogs and are told they are…

  • When Change Changes You.

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    Jessica Kooistra
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    Change: verb change (verb) · changes (third person present) · changed (past tense) · changed (past participle) · changing (present participle) We all experience change. Some change is good. Some change is bad. Some change changes you. When I started working in the animal welfare field, I was a kennel attendant in the shelter building. The old shelter building we still worked in, while…

  • The Welfare Issue.

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    Jessica Kooistra
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    Case in point – the happy Golden Retriever mix. We received multiple calls on a dog kept in a kennel all day, every day. I made contact with the family and concluded that the dog has always been an outside dog for them. I went over some basics with them regarding proper shelter in Michigan…

  • Living in Color

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    Jessica Kooistra
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    I’m walking up to a house where a complaint was made regarding an aggressive dog from this address seen loose often. I carry my catch pole in one hand and my notepad in the other as I make my way up to the front door. The house appears to be in disrepair. The driveway is…

  • Overload

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    Jessica Kooistra
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    It’s been a crazy couple of weeks. This post is the result of the many stresses that currently reside inside my brain, traveling into my neck and shoulders and making my muscles ache. The post will not be pretty, or grammatically correct. It is just a purge of thoughts and emotions that will hopefully still…

  • A Special Hell: Part 2

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    Jessica Kooistra
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    The scalpel cuts deep into the stomach lining making a perfectly straight line and splitting the organ wide open. Her gloved hands pry apart the stomach allowing us to peer inside. Rocks, leaves and undigested dirt make up the hollow cavern. It is Tuesday morning and I find myself kneeling on the floor of the…

  • A Special Hell: Part 1

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    Jessica Kooistra
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    *Disclaimer: this post will have some graphic stories and photos. I encourage you to read on anyway. It may not be what the general public sees on a daily basis, but it is my reality. My job. The most frustrating part of my profession is that people assume there is a black and white. An…

  • Not the usual suspects

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    Jessica Kooistra
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    “What is the most unusual animal you’ve had to deal with” is a question I’ve heard many times over the years. While most of my calls involve dogs and cats, you can imagine I’ve seen my share of random other animals in the past 15 years of doing this job. Responding to a rogue pet…

  • A Day in the Life.

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    Jessica Kooistra
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    You’ve seen ‘Animal Cops’ on Animal Planet right? Those people in uniforms that find awful puppy mills and starving horses and take the asshole owners to court. Or the one who picks up a hit-by-car dog and rushes it to the vet just in the nick of time. Well, that happens sometimes. The tedious, long…

  • She-Ra

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    Jessica Kooistra
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    I had just started working the road alone, after accepting the position as animal control officer and going through several weeks of training. I pulled up to a house in East Grand Rapids where a woman had reported a stray dog in her yard. I got out of my animal control vehicle, a large cargo…