20/12/2024
Truth for anyone who is part of caring, Christmas is a cold slog. Look to that bright star of promise and be thankful for any good you see, share some of your bounty, appreciate the workers who prop up your partying. The ones who watch ruefully muttering one day…’
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Christmas is an interesting time of year in animal rescue. While everyone is celebrating the end of work, schools being closed and the upcoming festivities, it's probably the time of year that rescue workers dread the most.
I know the general population doesn’t want to hear this, but yes, people start to surrender older dogs to make room for new puppies. Funds are incredibly slow, and the freezing cold weather doesn’t exactly make cleaning up dog poo at 8 o'clock in the morning the most enjoyable extracurricular activity. Volunteers start to dwindle, and the dreaded question of who is giving up their Christmas Day this year starts to rear its ugly head.
What’s more, ‘the most wonderful time of the year’ looks a little different for a shelter dog. They don’t have a cosy fire or a stocking of their own. They don’t get a turkey dinner or a Christmas jumper to wear. They sit in a kennel, and hope for a small sliver of affection or attention. Some are lucky enough to get a home by Christmas, but most will spend at least a month waiting to find their forever family.
Volunteers are an unbelievably bright light that work to make this time of year as special as possible for dogs- giving up their Christmas holidays, fighting the harsh elements, distributing leftover turkey as evenly as possible. But trying to cope with it all in December sometimes feels like climbing a mountain that keeps growing in size. The pile of abandoned dogs, cats, puppies just will not stop growing.
And I get it. Dogs don't understand what Christmas is. They’ve absolutely no clue that it’s different from any other day of the year. But humans do. We get emotional about Christmas and the ‘most wonderful time of the year’, so it seems like the only logical way people will fully appreciate how unfair life is for these dogs is if you give them glasses that tint the world to their viewpoint.
So if you are unaware of how difficult it is to exist in this world around the Christmas period, I hope this has shed a little light on what life is like this time of year.
The good news? You can help make next year a little more wonderful.
Fund-raise. Donate blankets, pillows, your scraps on boxing day. There are donation bins in every pet store for local charities. If you're thinking of a new year's resolution, give a few hours a week to a local charity. Share posts on social media, start conversations.
And above all else, just recognise that this time of year is bad. Recognise that our attitudes to animals in Northern Ireland means that Christmas for most of them in the last few years have been anything but bright. Recognise that wonderful for us means vulnerable for them.
It’s OK not to volunteer and I hope people understand that. Not everyone has the ability to give up their time, and that’s OK. But recognising that we need help in other ways, whether that be through donations, fundraising, social media, event attendance, is a form of volunteering in itself, and one that everyone can do.
The most vulnerable time of the year is just beginning for rescue workers, and we need all the help we can get.
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