We made the decision to sell because we didn’t know how to go on. The exhaustion and anxiety about finances made it difficult to manage the stress. We were on our last nerve. When we went off into epic rants to idiots who should have been ignored, we knew we were overreacting. We just couldn’t seem to stop ourselves from venting our overwrought emotional state.
In the midst of our own exhaustion, running away to something else seemed irresistibly attractive. The answer to what we would try next was an impenetrable enigma. Yet, hard as it was to try to unravel that enigma, thinking about it still seemed a more palatable alternative than just going on as we were at that point. It at least engendered a fragile sense of hope.
All of our efforts had brought us back full circle to the day four years previously when I had returned from that partners’ meeting and we decided we had to reinvent our life. This time however, we were both unhappily aware that no fresh path was presenting itself to us. Nothing was inspiring a burst of creative energy.
One thing we could agree on was that neither one of us wanted to go back to practising law. I took the position that since I had come up with the kennel idea, it was John’s turn now to come up with something we could both get excited about. He had nothing other than the toy store idea. He called an old friend of his who ran a model train shop in a little town south of where we lived, and had a desultory conversation about whether the store owner was interested in selling out to us.
Meanwhile, we told ourselves that we didn’t want to spook our clients by putting up a “For Sale” sign. In truth, though neither of us articulated it, we mostly shied away from listing the property because that would be a concrete step that would make this idea grimly real. Clearly we were still fantasizing more about escape than pragmatically planning for it.
We maintained the illusion of progress by placing a “Kennel For Sale” ad in the Canadian Kennel Club’s publication “Dogs in Canada”. Within a surprisingly short period of time we had an approach.
A man from the United States called. He was looking for a career change. We had a long chat on the phone. He was quite enthusiastic about what we had to tell him, although perhaps a bit unrealistic himself. He asked me, for example, if our 100 acres was big enough that it would take all day to ride a horse across it. (We could walk across it in about twenty minutes.)
We suggested to him that we would do a video, showing the kennel, the house, the land and the neighbourhood and mail it to him.
We had fun with that project, which made us both feel enlivened and engaged. Coincidentally, it also gave us a chance to take a fresh look at all we had accomplished.
Significantly, when we didn’t hear again from the man in the U.S. after we had mailed him the VHS tape with our amateur Oak Meadows documentary, we found we weren’t disappointed.
About this time, the Ottawa Citizen decided to do another story featuring our kennel, pictures and all. We spoke to the reporter while the dogs frolicked around us.
As we told her our history, we found ourselves becoming more and more enthusiastic. Here was an exercise in seeing our business – indeed our life – through someone else’s eyes; a chance to step back from all those gnarly trees, and enjoy the view of the wonderful forest.
Shortly after the story appeared in the paper, we were contacted by a couple I knew from law school. Like us, they were disillusioned with the practice of law. Having seen our story in the paper, they called us to ask if we had any advice for them about starting a kennel. When I mentioned that we had been thinking about selling ours, they became very interested.
Meanwhile, Sally and Naomi were still trying to get their pet resort-style kennel started about 10 kilometres from us. They had actually bought their 100 acres about the same time as we had bought ours. Their land was across the road from a rural residential subdivision. Unlike our situation, their neighbours were not at all happy about a dog kennel going in across the road and had done everything they could to block it from being built. By this point, they had been at it for a few years, had spent over ten thousand dollars in legal fees and were no closer to breaking ground.
Sally hadn’t see the ad in ‘Dogs In Canada’, but she had read the story in the Citizen. It increased all her frustrations with her and her partner’s attempt at creating something similar. She called to ask if we wanted to hire her as help in the kennel. She was bored her out of her mind with her current job and thought that if she couldn’t have her own kennel, maybe she could at least work in ours and get some hands-on experience while her own dream was stalled.
For a number of reasons, we weren’t interested in hiring her, but we did tell her we were thinking of selling. Sally discussed this new development with Naomi. They immediately expressed their interest in buying our place.
Shortly thereafter, yet another person called about the ad in “Dogs in Canada”. This one was a small time breeder who was excited by the idea that a boarding kennel might fund her dog breeding activities.
Now we had three potential buyers. Was this a repeat of how things had fallen into place in 1998? Was the universe sending us a message that we were right to think about moving on?
We talked to the three groups in turn over the course of the next weeks. Sally and Naomi actually made us a formal offer. The small time breeder was working on getting financing. The lawyers too.
As this was developing, we became increasingly concerned by the fact that a plan B for our future was still eluding us.
We thought about the other types of businesses we had considered years before. The problems we saw then were still obstacles. Any retail business was going to tie us to a storefront seven days a week. True, this was the case with our present business, but unlike the kennel where we had the middle of every day to ourselves, one or both of us would have to be at a retail operation from opening to closing. With Sunday shopping and extended hours, this meant a lot of time spent tied to the store. A tea room would not have to open as early or stay open as late as a shop, but the tea room had some of the same problems as a retail operation, or for that matter, the kennel.
A bed and breakfast was less likely to tie us down all day, every day. It was an investment in real estate, which was a plus. But a bed and breakfast shared another big drawback with both a retail operation and a tea room.
All of them, crucially, required that we have constant dealings with people. The vast majority of problems and frustrations we had with the kennel involved people, not dogs and cats. Sure, we occasionally did get frustrated with barking or hysterical dogs, or cats who insisted on climbing into the ceiling or peeing outside their litter boxes. But we were much quicker to excuse their behaviour and simply move on. They were innocent animals after all, who were only acting according to their natures.
On the other hand, we expected people to behave with respect and a reasonable degree of decorum. The rude and arrogant ones were only a tiny fraction of our clients at Oak Meadows. Any retail or service business or B&B would require us to deal with people, and only people, all the time.
I kept flashing on memories of a little hobby we had pursued for a short while many years before. I had been a doll collector. For a time, we amused ourselves by buying dolls, toys and other doll related trinkets wholesale, and traveling around to doll shows on weekends. We would rent a table, set out our wares and sell them, or more precisely, attempt to sell them to the public.
Every time a child would start fingering the merchandise, this outraged look would dawn over John’s face, especially if the child was particularly ill mannered and was being ignored (or even encouraged) by its doting parent.
“Don’t touch my stuff,” he would growl. “Why are you touching my stuff?”
Was this the face that was going to sell toys, trains and dolls full time for a living? Operate a bed and breakfast? John felt real kinship with Basil Fawlty.
I could see us crashing and burning within six months of opening our doors.
On the other side of the equation, dealing with the prospective buyers made us appreciate how far we had come.
For one thing, we were just beginning to see a payoff for the huge amounts of money we had invested in this dream. The monthly repayments on the building loan were decreasing. By tiny increments, but still. The income generated by the kennel was increasing. A sale would recover the capital costs of building the kennel, but we would never recover all the money we had invested in the soft costs.
We had banking and bookkeeping all figured out and routinised. We had developed and refined our Boarding Agreement as well as a number of forms and ‘form letter’ emails, so that the amount of work we had to do when people made contact to schedule a visit or make a booking was minimal.
We had a large and loyal clientele by this point, wonderful people who made us feel appreciated, who we looked forward to seeing. We had worked hard at pleasing established clients. The result was that we now had a very robust client list. Word of mouth was so fantastic that we had dropped our big expensive Yellow Pages ad in our second full year of business year, in favour of a one line listing.
It helped that we had cultivated every vet in the surrounding areas and the city of Ottawa. We had made a point of visiting each and every vet personally at some point during the year to leave our business cards with them and give them a gift of chocolates or homemade cookies to thank them for thinking of us.
And of course, they saw us when we brought in their own clients’ dogs if they fell ill. The result was that veterinarians were not only referring people to us, they were becoming clients themselves.
We had a set routine that worked well. Kennel stress was reduced. We knew so many of our dog and cat boarders as well as we knew our own dogs and cats. We absolutely loved many of them as if they were our own. Some days – many days – were damned near perfect. The dogs all got along, the weather was great. I would be sitting on a bench in one of the play yards, holding a couple of cuddly little visitors in my lap, face to the sun, completely happy.
With the advent of digital cameras, John was starting to send out photos by email to our clients, many of them with funny captions, and special editions for holidays, with the dogs dressed up.
The clients loved this innovation. One lady with two chow chows came back from a cruise and was crowing about one-upping her dinner companion. That lady was stressing about how her pets were doing in the kennel she had left them in. Lenore responded, “Oh really? Our kennel sends us photos by email. In fact, after dinner I’m going to go online and see the latest.”
No matter how tired or sad or mad we were, coming into the kennel and being greeted by dozens of dogs, madly wagging their tails with joy simply to see us, was guaranteed to make us smile.
In truth, there simply weren’t that many awful clients. On the contrary, by this time most of our clients were repeat customers who respected us and the reasons why we operated as we did; who were appreciative and a positive pleasure to deal with. Check ins became a matter of smiles and laughter, dogs racing to the back door, ready for their walks and to meet their fellow playmates.
And then there was the property. John had started working on his dream model train layout in the enormous area on the second floor of the heated two story garage.
We had done some renovations to the house, and had finally gotten all our stuff unpacked and stored away. John had started a flower garden in the front yard. Our neighbours were super. We loved living in the country. We loved our old stone house.
Although we were tied to the business 365 days a year (unless we closed altogether as we had done for my niece’s wedding), we nevertheless had a huge degree of autonomy in how we ran our lives. Once we were finished at the kennel in the morning, we had a nice big block of time in the middle of the day to do with as we wished. The opportunity to do our groceries, banking, dental appointments and other errands at 11:00 a.m on a Wednesday instead of cramming it all into Saturday morning could not be discounted lightly.
We had no commute. We didn’t have to get dressed up. Sure, we cursed the bad weather, but we now realised that having spent a good part of every day outdoors for years, we simply could not face the tyranny of being chained inside an office or store, breathing recirculated air for eight or more hours every day, five days or more days per week.
And best of all, we had control over the rules.
We had finally set some boundaries so that we could try to have a personal life. True, those boundaries were often breached. But the fact was, each confrontation with an angry latecomer weeded out people we didn’t want to deal with anyway. As word of mouth spread, more and more of our referrals came from clients who were happy with us; who understood and applauded how we did business. New people who approached us because of a recommendation from a friend often already knew something about us and how we operated. Sometimes they’d even volunteer the information that they knew they had to be on time, before we could raise the subject.
As we discussed where we were and what the possible alternative futures were, we realized that pretty much all of the heavy lifting had been done. The future looked promising. Were we really stupid enough to walk away now, abandoning the entire investment for others to reap the advantages of, just because we were worn out from tasks that would never have to be done again?
The attempt at selling the kennel had given us a sort of “It’s A Wonderful Life” experience. The worst day at Oak Meadows was still better than any other alternative. We realized exactly how lucky we were. And isn’t that knowledge 90% of maintaining a happy and positive attitude?
In the end, we told all of our prospective buyers that we had experienced a change of heart and were going to soldier on. They were disappointed, but resigned.
Something else that helped us remember how lucky we were, was our pro bono work for Interval House, the shelter for battered women in a nearby town.
We had always supported that shelter financially. One day not long after we started our new business, I was writing a cheque for them. I suddenly wondered whether our business would be successful enough to allow us to continue sending them money. That made me wonder if there was some other way we could help. It occurred to me that maybe the women going to the shelter would have dogs or cats and would need somewhere to leave them until they could get their lives together. It seemed kind of a silly idea, but I thought I would call and see what they thought.
They fell on me with open arms. I was told that all kinds of women stay in abusive situations because they are worried about their pets. The abusive partner holds the dog or cat hostage, threatening horrible retribution on the animal if the woman dares to leave. The shelter was not set up to be able to allow women to take their animals to live with them there. If we could board them for free, it would be a great help.
The first call came that summer. Could we find space for five little dogs? These dogs were so tiny that, as the shelter worker said, if you rolled them all into a ball they wouldn’t make one real dog. We kept the five dogs in the kennel and walked them together, always paralysed with fear that we were going to step on one or another of them and crush it like an egg. They were cutie pies. They stayed for the better part of the summer.
These were just the first of many cats and dogs we kept for Interval House residents, sometimes just for a few days; more frequently for weeks or months. The longest resident was with us for fifteen months while her owner waited for low rental housing. I was struck by how many of these animals had been rescued from bad situations by women who were themselves the victims of abuse. I expect that their own abuse engendered in the women a feeling of empathy towards unfortunate animals in similar situations.
However, sometimes, you had to wonder at the thinking.
One woman had two children under the age of five and was pregnant again. She also had a large shepherd/collie mix puppy, and a badly trained puppy at that. The children I could understand. You don’t always have a choice about getting pregnant, especially if you are with an abusive and controlling man. But why on god’s green weary earth would she get a puppy? The puppy was in our care over Christmas and the little family would come and visit her sometimes. The kids were always so thrilled to see her. I guess maybe that was the explanation.
Another young woman had two small children, as well as two dogs; a German shepherd and a Border collie, neither one of which was spayed. We took them on condition she allow us to have them spayed at our expense. We thought we could at least give them that much of a chance. We didn’t see much of a future for this menagerie in any other respect. They were lovely dogs but completely untrained. Another situation where they would come in from outside to pee and poop. For six months we gave free room and board to those dogs, and for six months we cleaned up poop and pee two to three times a day. After she took them to her new digs, she called one day to say the Border collie had jumped the fence and run away.
Sigh.
It was quite heartbreaking to watch these women cuddle and kiss and cry over their pets when they arrived, sometimes with broken teeth or bruises. One well dressed middle aged woman had a very well cared for cat. This lady was atypical in that, in addition to being dressed well, she was impeccably coiffed and groomed and driving a late model car. Both she and the cat seemed bewildered by their circumstances. She thanked us warmly and sincerely for looking after her cat, and remarked in a bemused way that she “never knew until now how many kind people there were in the world”. I suspect it was the first time in an otherwise fairly privileged life, that she had needed help from strangers.
It was always a happy day when the Interval House ladies came to pick up their pets, having finally found some low rental housing. But it didn’t always end well.
One girl – and she was a girl; she couldn’t have been more than 18, if that – left her orange and white kitten with us at the same time as another, obviously more hardened woman, left her cat. These two apparently struck up a friendship at the shelter, where it was very obvious the older woman was leading the younger, and not in a good way. They would call and say they were coming to visit their cats, and then not show. Or they would show up unannounced, which was of course a big no-no with us.
One weekend, they showed up and said they were taking their cats with them for the weekend on a visit to some friend of the older woman. The very next morning, they showed up again unexpectedly, and dropped off the cat and kitten again, with no explanation of the change of plans.
A few days later, we got a call from Interval House, telling us that both women had been ejected from the Shelter for repeated infractions of the rules there, including attempting to smuggle their cats in for the night. I got the feeling there had been far more serious infractions as well, and suspected drugs or alcohol, at least in the case of the older woman.
We awaited developments. The older woman came to pick up her cat. No sign of the younger one. After a few weeks, the shelter called to say they had had no success in trying to contact the kitten’s owner and asked whether we thought we could find it a home or make other appropriate arrangements.
As it happened, the kitten was being quite friendly with one of our boarding cats, Emma. We sent pictures of the two of them to Emma’s owners and told them Nugget was looking for a home. We made wheedling comments about how great the two of them were together and how Emma would love to have some company during the day when they were at work. They expressed interest, and in a bid to seal the deal, we told them we would have Nugget spayed at our expense, if they would provide her with a home. They agreed. We saw Nugget from time to time thereafter, when she came back to board.
Many months after we had been successful in getting Nugget adopted, I got a call from Nugget’s previous owner. She was ready to pick up her kitten now.
I had a moment’s horror. What had we done? Then, gathering my courage, I told her what had occurred and why. She asked if we could get the kitten back from its new home. I hesitated only for a moment, while I thought not only about how upset Nugget’s new owners would justifiably be at having her torn away from them, but frankly, and more importantly in my eyes, the fact that Nugget now had a stable, loving home. Who knew what her fate would be if I turned her back over to this young woman?
I told her firmly but kindly that that was impossible, and then steeled myself as she broke into tears. I felt badly for her, but Nugget was a living, sentient creature, and this person couldn’t take care of herself, let alone another being. I called Interval House to tell them what had occurred and they endorsed my decision.
One woman whose cat we had kept while she was in the Shelter, called us a few years later. She had fallen on hard times. Would we keep her cat, even though she was not in the Shelter? We said yes and she proceeded to lead us a merry dance. She had no transportation; could we come and get the cat? Yes. A short while later, another call. She was now living in a motel in a seedy area of Ottawa. Could we bring the cat back to her? Yes. A while later, another call. She had to move out, could we come and get the cat? Yes.
Although we had little sympathy for this woman, who seemed to be a chronic user, we did feel badly for her cat, who was a lovely relaxed girl, despite her chaotic home life, so we kept making our trips up and down the highway to Ottawa, until finally she got settled.
We kept three – three – St. Bernards for one woman in the shelter. None of them were spayed. We were assured they would not go into heat. Uh huh. Nope. So, that happened.
After many months, the somewhat elderly lady who owned these dogs was persuaded by the shelter to think about re-homing at least two of them. The oldest dog would not be given up under any circumstances, but if we could possibly help in finding a home for the other two, it would be appreciated. The lady did not want them to be separated.
We weren’t optimistic, but this was one of those times when things worked out. We put the word out to our wonderful dog loving clients and they put the word out to their friends and somehow, an enthusiastic lady contacted us, begging to be allowed to be considered a candidate to take the dogs. She already owned a Saint, and was thrilled to have the chance to acquire two more. She sent us pictures of her big beautiful home and yard. Once the dogs went home with her, she continued to send us photos of them flopped down on their enormous plush beds, which we forwarded to their very grateful former owner.
One woman had two huge, beautiful orange and white cats, Bud and Blue. The names confused me, until I recognised there was a beer theme going on. I have met a lot of cats in my life, but never two like these fellows. On the day they were to arrive, we got a call from the vet’s office where they were being vaccinated for free. The vet had diagnosed ear mites; would we still take them? After speaking to the vet and determining that the situation could be contained and not threaten to spread to other cats in the kennel, we agreed to pay the fairly modest cost of the medicine, and told her to bring them along. The vet warned me that one of them was not at all happy.
When the lady showed up, she had the cats on leashes and harnesses, like dogs. One was indeed unhappy, snarling and snapping at anything within his reach. It was not unusual that the Interval House boarders came to us unhappy, fearful and stressed, as they were too often themselves on the receiving end of abuse, or at least had been living in a very stress-filled and uncertain environment. However, as with all of their predecessors, Bud and Blue did settle in and become relaxed, once they realized they were in a safe, calm and stable situation with us.
This had its down side though. These cats were scary smart and quickly became bored with the entertainment offered at the kennel. They wanted out and made every effort to dart out the door when opportunity offered. Fortunately we managed to foil their attempts.
Eventually we decided to take them to the house. Not only was the kennel overcrowded with paying customers at that point, we thought it might offer them more by way of stimulation. To separate them from our cats, we started out by shutting Bud and Blue into a spare room. They proceeded to investigate every nook and cranny. They managed to open an armoire that was in the room; not just the doors at the front of the piece, but the heavy drawers as well. They dragged all John’s ties out onto the floor, but not to destroy them. No, it looked more like they had just decided to conduct an investigation into his fashion sense. If so, they would have been disappointed, as there was nothing in there that wasn’t at least five years old by that point.
They somehow managed to slide their water bowl – without spilling any, mind you – from the far corner of the room, to a spot just inside the door, so if you entered unwarily, you would step in it. I don’t know what their thinking was. A burglar alarm?
They were not content with being confined to one room for very long. The first time I left the room, they watched me intently. Next time I came in to visit, Bud stretched up to the door knob and put both paws on it, trying to turn it. If he had not been handicapped by having no opposable thumb and forefinger, he would have been gone.
They took to scratching at the door and rattling it loudly at all hours of the day and night. In self defence, we decided to let out them out with our cats. At first, things went reasonably well. They contented themselves with exploring the large house.
But it wasn’t long before they started chasing and harassing our cats as if they were a dog pack. Our cats took to running outside as soon as they saw the Wild Hunt come out.
Every time the outside door would open, Bud and Blue would try to get out too. We hooked them up with harnesses and leads and tied them outside.
This contented them for another short while, but then they figured out how to get out of their harnesses. Finally, defeated by these feline masterminds, we started just opening the door and letting them outside. They were always ravenously hungry for canned food, and we figured that, as several weeks had now passed, they knew where the food source was and could be relied upon to come back. Anyway, they tended to come when called, like a pair of dogs.
This theory held for several days. Then the day came when we could only find one of them. We went out and called periodically for Bud, sure that the missing cat would show up, especially since his brother was with us, and the two were virtually inseparable. As the hours went by and there was still no sign of him, we started to pin our hopes on dinner time. This guy had never missed a meal. Still, nothing. With sinking heart I started to picture what I could say to this young woman who had entrusted her most precious possessions to us in the middle of her terrible crisis. Not only had she been abused by her partner and had to seek refuge for herself and her cats; the people to whom she entrusted her cats had now lost one of them. I felt two inches high.
Darkness started to descend and we decided we would have to mount a search of all the outbuildings before it became too dark to see. I started with the stable. I got three steps into the Stygian gloom, tripped over a pile of old lumber, hit my head and smashed my glasses. I retired from the lists in ignominious defeat.
Shortly thereafter, Bud strolled into the yard, ran into the kitchen and leapt lightly onto the table, demanding his supper. After that he enjoyed a little recreational time chasing one of our cats and injuring her so badly she limped for three weeks. The next day we sent them up the road to stay with our son and daughter-in-law. Their owner picked them up a few weeks later. We all wondered how they would cope in a small apartment, confined indoors all the time. We never heard back from them.
Bud and Blue, wherever you are, peace my brothers.
One day just before the start of a particularly busy period, I took a call from a woman who said hesitantly, “I have an emergency….”
I waited for her to finish, confidently expecting her to say that her friend/relative/dogwalker was supposed to have kept her dogs and now couldn’t do it on short notice, and could we take her pet? Instead, she said, “I heard a rumour that you people will sometimes keep dogs and cats for women who are in situations of abuse.”
I told her that yes, this was true, although generally our clients came to us through Interval House.
“Okay,” she said in a defeated tone of voice, “Sorry to have bothered you.”
“Hang on a minute,” I interjected hurriedly. “I’m not saying we can’t help you. Just tell me what’s going on.”
The woman then told me how her daughter was living with a violent and abusive man. She wanted to leave him, but she had a beautiful, sweet natured German shepherd dog and feared what would happen if she left the dog and disappeared with her child. The mother was disabled, and living in a tiny studio apartment herself. With the best will in the world, she couldn’t house the dog as well as her daughter and her grandchild.
I told her that we would be willing to take the dog, at least for a short while, until we filled up with paying clients. I always started out with that caveat. Of course once the dog or cat was in our care, we became engaged with the animal and with the situation. We never, ever, not even once, told someone they had to come and get their pet because we were full, even though we frequently were. One dog was with us for fifteen months.
This lady was pathetically grateful. She said her daughter was hoping to leave that afternoon, and I suggested she could bring the dog to us directly on her way to the mother’s. In the end, the dog didn’t come, but we received a lovely heartfelt note from the mother and daughter thanking us for “our patience and understanding” and telling us that “just your generosity and calm and willingness to help was such a relief to us, you have no idea….. You are doing a wonderful service and we only wish there were more people like you.”
Years later, we were contacted by the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty To Animals. They were conducting a study on the link between domestic abuse of women and their domestic animals, and had somehow heard about the small contribution we were making. Their findings confirmed what I had been told on my initial contact with Interval House; that in addition to all the other barriers that impede battered women leaving their abuser, is the complication of loving and wanting to protect their pets from harm, be it dogs, cats, or even horses or cows.
For one wild-eyed moment I thought about our empty stable and considered offering it for the housing of cows or horses, but fortunately reason returned to its throne before I could make the offer, and I remembered that (a) I knew very little about the care of cows and horses, notwithstanding that my sister had had a pony when we were kids; in the natural order of the universe, its care and feeding had fallen largely to my long-suffering father; (b) we were already overextended in terms of our energy to work ratio, and (c) my own long-suffering spouse would finally rebel at finding the tasks of mucking out stables and feeding horses and cows added to his daily routine.
I occasionally had a good laugh amidst the more unhappy feelings these situations engendered. We had agreed to take on three cats for a woman at Interval House, even though two of them were not spayed. We didn’t usually take unspayed cats, and John wasn’t thrilled about the situation, but I had talked him into it. After a few false starts, the woman finally arrived with a couple of friends. It happened that John was there and I was still out on a dog walk. When I got back, I hurried to the front to see if help was required and walked into what was obviously a Situation. The body language alone was enough to tell me something had gone wrong.
John turned around with a look that I can only describe as baffled outrage and said “You’ll have to deal with this. I’m out of my league.”
I turned to the group of three adults and two pale, unhappy looking children, all of whom were wearing expressions ranging from fear to anger to confusion. I inquired what was going on. Although they weren’t the most articulate group of people, I finally deduced that one of the unspayed cats had started to have kittens in the car.
“All we asked him,” one of the women said plaintively, gesturing after John’s retreating back, “was what your policy was on that.”
In all our planning and organisation we had somehow inexplicably overlooked putting a policy in place to deal with checking in cats in labour.
It turned out it wasn’t as bad as I first thought. The mother cat was not in the car after all. Rather, the vet in a nearby town who generously gave free immunizations to animals belonging to Interval House ladies in this situation, had agreed to take her. I gathered they had somehow managed to leave her with the vet before or during their trip here. I explained that John doesn’t hear well, plus he had his coat hood up over his hat so I’m sure he heard almost nothing except ‘cat in labour’, and thought they wanted him to be the mid-wife.
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