I lost a friend last night. Well not a ‘real’ friend really but a
Facebook friend. She 'unfriended' me on Facebook because when
she posted some pretty hateful stuff toward people who we really need to
influence I pointed out to her that judging and hating never influenced anyone
to change. I shared that personally I’m not here to
judge or hate anyone but to help dogs and educate people. I also expressed my personal wish that the people
who believe that by judging and hating on people you can influence them to do
better or do something different would leave the animal welfare community
because it’s not productive, the judging and hating, and it only drags the rest
of us down. So she unfriended me which I
am not taking personally in the least and to be perfectly honest isn’t a big
deal to me. I don’t
view it as a personal loss but view it as an unfortunate move because one never
knows when networking and joining forces will benefit a cause; so the community
loses but not me personally.
I understand the need to vent. I most certainly understand that being exposed to the injustices
and abuses day after day after day can become painful and is as frustrating as
hell. I get frustrated. I get so frustrated I think about giving up
sometimes because it seems as if the harder we work the less we accomplish because
on some fronts, like cops shooting people’s dogs or people fighting dogs or
people abusing dogs or dogs needlessly dying in shelters because there’s no
room or they have behavioral issues, it seems like we are losing a whole hell
of a lot more ground than we are gaining.
I get pissed. I get truly
aggravated. I want to slap people, kick
asses and cuss people out. But I don’t. Why don’t I you ask? Because although it may vent my anger, my
frustration and my feelings of inadequacy, helplessness and hopelessness it doesn’t
do anyone but me a damn bit of good. It
doesn’t influence any of those people who carry out the acts that are the
source of my aggravation and despair to change.
It doesn’t manifest one bit of change and it sure as hell doesn’t help
or save one single dog. If you think
that venting your anger, frustration, judgment and hatred over the things you
see that are wrong on social media saves dogs then you are clearly not thinking
logically or are under some sort of misguided idea that you have a whole lot
more influence by being angry and being judgmental than you could ever have by
reaching out to those people who you are hating on.
In fact all it really does when I vent my anger among my
fellow animal welfare friends is to motivate them to join in and vent their own
anger. So the next thing you know,
usually on a thread started by a post to help a dog, the thread is filled with
judgment, hatred and anger and not many of the comments are constructive in
that not many of them are doing anything to help the dog. So a thread started by a post to help a dog
that is in dire need or maybe is in imminent danger of losing its life in a
shelter fills up with people fuming about the piece of shit people who caused
the dog to be in the shelter in the first place. If you could I’d like someone out there to
explain to me, in laymen’s terms if you will because apparently I’m just too
stupid to understand this approach to saving dogs, exactly how hating on the people
who caused the dog to be in danger of losing its life or in need of a home is
helping the dog get out of the shelter and into a new home. Yes all of you out there reading this please
if you have an explanation of how this helps the dogs please share it with me
because I’m just too damned daft to see it apparently.
In the end space on threads to help dogs is being taken up
by the judgers and haters while a few of us try to pick through all the
comments judging and hating to find the people who, like us, are trying to actually
DO something to help the dog. It’s very frustrating for me to have to pick
out the helpful comments from all the judging and hating plus it actually makes
me feel a bit ashamed to be a part of the animal welfare community at the same
time. So many say it’s for the dogs but when I see
those comments posted on those threads I have to question some people’s
motives. Is it really for the dogs or is
it just to fill our own emotional needs to be needed and/or to feel
superior to those people who aren’t nearly as perfect as you believe that you are? I’m far from perfect and have made
mistakes with dogs in my lifetime so it’s easy I suppose for me to relate to
those who simply don’t know any better and therefore don’t always do the right
thing for the dog. I do know that being
judged harshly in a public forum for those mistakes would never in a million
years motivate me to do better and I can’t be the only one…
My dear and very wise friend Foster Corder, that I admire
immensely for his drive to unite the animal welfare community and help dogs,
said something in an interview I watched yesterday that really struck a chord
in me. It was something that I think
applies to this whole issue and that is that before we go around judging others we must first clean up our own house. To me that translates into something very
real and critical for us at this juncture in the existence of the animal
welfare community. If we are going to
influence the people who abuse dogs, who fight dogs, who are irresponsible dog
owners, who abandon dogs, who purchase dogs rather than adopt them out there in
the general public then FIRST and FOREMOST we’ve got to get our collective shit
together. We need to STOP, CEASE AND
DESIST with the public judging and hating on people on social media who don’t do
what we believe they should be doing or who are doing things we don’t believe
they should be doing. If we are going to
get them to stop doing what they are doing or begin doing what we want them to
do then we MUST, MUST, MUST change our approach and that includes not
bashing them or people like them all over social media every time a dog ends up
abused or in a shelter. This is critical
to our success in encouraging, inspiring, educating and helping people change
so that fewer dogs will end up dead in shelters or at the hands of humans. That’s just it…we really need to encourage, inspire,
educate and help people do better; not believe that we can judge and hate them
into doing better.
This animal welfare community has been around a long time
before I joined it by becoming a pit bull advocate and it will hopefully be
around a long time after I’m dead and gone but our history isn’t the best due
to the way a lot of our people operate within this community. We haven’t done the best job we could do
because those who ‘get it’ and can suspend judgment in order to reach people
and influence them to do better are outnumbered it seems by those who choose to
allow their emotions to rule them and rather than suspend judgment they completely miss the opportunity to help someone change for the better; for the next
dog they get and the next. When we spew our negative feelings
all over social media about people it only serves to alienate the very people we need to
influence.
All I know is that by continuing to operate as a community
in this manner it is truly a sign of insanity, which is what most ‘outsiders’
think of people in the animal welfare community are, because to continue
to do the same thing in the same way again and again and again expecting a
different outcome is the very definition of insanity.
We’ve got to do better at policing our own ranks which means
we’ve got to do better at helping those who lose their cool because they are
frustrated and angry understand that while we do sympathize and even empathize
with them that we must overcome the urge to vent out there on social media, to
judge people on social media and to spew hatred out on social media. We need to encourage those less hardy among
us to private message their friends if they feel the need to express their
frustration and anger about those people who just abandoned an elderly dog at
their shelter or abused a dog or fought a dog.
We’ve got to do a better job of letting our fellow animal welfare
advocates get that while we understand their angst we can’t tolerate their
negative comments out on social media on the threads following posts to help
dogs. We need to make it perfectly clear
to them that in order for us to be as effective as possible that the space, the time, the effort must be focused SOLELY on helping
the dog and not wasted on condemning the people who caused the dog to need our
help. In
other words those of us who ‘get it’ and who can maintain our cool when we want
to bash the hell out of someone on social media need to let others know what
kind of community we want to be and what kind of united front we want to show
to the general public. It’s passed the time for us to show a united front of people who
are focused ONLY on helping dogs, helping owners who need assistance so they
don’t have to give up their dogs, helping the general public understand that as
a society we need to be more responsible dog owners and if they don’t know what
to do that they need to find out what to do; that they need to ask for help because
WE are here to HELP, not to judge or condemn.
There is a Wiccan code that Wiccans and witches, good witches of course,
live by that states, ‘An' ye harm none, do
what ye will. What ye
send forth comes back to thee…’. It’s a code that we need to adopt and live by
in the animal welfare community in order to truly accomplish those things that
so many in the community work so tirelessly, selflessly and generously to
accomplish. We must change because if we
don’t change then progress will never be made and in generations to come people like us will still
be facing the same challenges and obstacles that we face today and will be feeling and saying the same things
which only means that our community is indeed insane…
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