The Stray World

I have found volun­teer­ing for the SPCA-KK to be one of the hard­est tasks I have set for myself to date.

National Ser­vice? All you needed to do was fol­low orders.

Being ragged by seni­ors in uni­ver­sity? It was only a four-day thing, as repuls­ive as it was.

Here though, is a job where volun­teers come in with the express hope of redu­cing the amount of cruelty exper­i­enced by anim­als, with a par­tic­u­lar emphasis (for now) on cats and dogs.

While I hold no illu­sions as to what the real world is like com­pared to the com­fort­ing con­fines of assign­ments and home­work — I would sub­mit that volun­teer work with the SPCA may give a per­son more of those oft-mentioned char­ac­ter build­ing train­ing than those sup­posedly character-building three-day camp­ing trips over the week­end organ­ised by lec­tur­ers or students.

To date, I have inured myself to the smell and tex­ture of fae­ces through the daily task of clean­ing up after the dogs, whom use news­pa­pers for toi­lets; learnt to feed close to 50 dogs of which most are allowed to run around the com­pound; admin­is­ter med­ic­a­tion to adult and juven­ile dogs alike through tac­tics that one can only pick up on the job; befriend and rehab­il­it­ate trau­mat­ised dogs (though it is still a hit and miss with this ven­ture); euth­an­ize and bury dogs; and other les­sons that will no doubt make one stronger, or break one’s will to fight.

The par­tic­u­lar clar­ity gained from work­ing with the SPCA that I would not have picked up oth­er­wise from my pre­vi­ous work with envir­on­ment­al­ists, and cur­rently athe­ists, is the need to sol­dier on des­pite the apathy towards animal welfare.

Envir­on­ment­al­ism is quite an easy sell as it can be painted as work­ing towards the pro­tec­tion of your own needs. In other words, you need to do this to save yourself.

The athe­ist move­ment is cur­rently in its infancy in Malay­sia, so there is not much to say there yet — although I must add the band of ded­ic­ated indi­vidu­als and the only work to put forth for now is the gath­er­ing of ideas makes the task rel­at­ively more emo­tion­ally sat­is­fy­ing com­pared to work­ing around the demands of vari­ous groups in defend­ing animal rights.

The animal wel­fare move­ment how­ever, is well-known enough that at least here in Kota Kin­abalu, calls about animal suf­fer­ing are dir­ec­ted to the SPCA first instead of the muni­cipal coun­cil, because of the council’s infam­ous repu­ta­tion for bru­tal­ity towards the dogs dur­ing and after capture.

Yet at the end, not a lot of volun­teers come in for the actual work. Work that does not bene­fit one in any con­ceiv­able man­ner. When one loses the sen­ti­ment of emo­tional gain or any other intan­gibles, the work of animal wel­fare is then defined as an example of true altruism.

The self­less­ness neces­sary for help­ing another spe­cies without any hope for reward. Or rather in the case of the Animal Wel­fare Unit I am part of, to slave ones life away in between work and sleep that one replaces everything else that mat­ters trivi­ally, whether they be hob­bies, parties, or cel­eb­ra­tions, into the folder marked “Post­poned Indef­in­itely”, I feel noth­ing but humble­ness at the extent these remark­able people I work with are will­ing to sac­ri­fice for the sake of another species.

Unlike them, I am able to per­form my roles in the SPCA without con­cern for time and money as all I am doing is spend­ing my free time after the end of my under­gradu­ate stud­ies as I wish. I don’t have to worry about jug­gling time at work with time to clean and eat.

At the heart of it all, I freely admit to being inad­equate to the tasks deman­ded of me should I need to struggle in between work and volun­teer­ing. That the least I could do is to donate this time of mine, free for use before it too runs out.

And that at the very least, I did change my diet to reflect my prin­ciples to reduce cruelty and live more ethically.

That at the very least, I con­firmed per­son­ally for myself, that euth­an­iz­ing an animal is an act of mercy, and a hell of a lot more dig­ni­fied than what a chicken has to go through before end­ing up on a plate.