Dare To Care – The Life You Save May Be Someones Future Pet
February 24 is officially Spay Day USA 2009, an annual campaign of The Humane Society of the United States to inspire people to save animals lives by spaying or neutering pets and feral cats.
Originally I thought that I might republish one of the very first articles I had ever written as a way to inspire people. In rereading it I realized that not only was it dated and too regionalized, having been published in “The Laramie Sunday Boomerang,” December 19, 1982, but that after all these years I finally wanted to follow the advice of a teacher, and write it differently. I guess with my increase in age and experience his wisdom finally had a chance to sink in!
At the time I was living in Laramie, Wyoming, and decided to take a class on how to get published. The teacher was Donald Murray, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist. I was not really certain why I was taking the class other than the opportunity to be guided by someone who could write well enough to win such a prestigious award. In retrospect I think it was my writing blood yearning for an outlet.
My assignment for the class was to choose two topics on which to write, write them up as a query to a publisher, and submit the final for publication. Having no idea what to write about, I decided to write about what I did know, animals. Topic Number One was a story about my pet rats (which ultimately resulted in a cooking column for the University of WA student paper, a story for another time). For Topic Number Two, I approached the local animal shelter and asked if I could research an article about the shelter and the animals they tried to save. They agreed, and I spent a week tracking the animal residents, looking for the angle that would result in a good