“Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough; Give the world the best you've got anyway.” From the poem Anyway, attributed to Mother Teresa So what do a vet, attorney and actress all have in common besides an abundance of compassion?...
“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” - Epictetus “Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.” - Anatole France As part of this series, I asked folks why they provide end-of-life care...
There are just so many kisses to be had. So many just waiting to be given. So much love waiting to get out. All right there in your local municipal shelter. In Chicago, that's Chicago Animal Care and Control, located at 2741 S. Western. You...
Generally speaking, in Chicago’s sheltering landscape of days gone by, there were not always good deaths to be had, and there were far too many deaths to contemplate with any sense of sanity. For an accurate picture whence we’ve come, I went to speak with...
The Life in My Hands Part 4 -- Mutability, the Addiction; Passing Time, the Anodyne I promised you intrigue, and I know thus far, I have miserably failed to deliver. But this is a fine place to begin the discussion of how my current addiction took...
The Life in My Hands Part 3 -- The Family Dog as Teacher I suppose we all have our mythologies, our threads of endless and eternal truths and lies that we utter to ourselves to keep grounded while clambering around Samsara’s hamster wheel. Gramp figures largely...
A multi-part blog post of a personal essay delivered at the Chicago Literary Society in January 2017. The Life in My Hands Part 2 -- Roots of Sensibilities So rather than attempt to define what kind of animal lover I am, I will describe how the tormented...
Part 8 in a series of Saving Chicago’s Healthy and Treatable Animals I love this City. But I’ve noticed over the last few years that we really gotta talk. And we really need to come together and “make no small plans” for pets and people. Chicago has...
Part Three of a Series of Posts On Saving Chicago’s Healthy and Treatable Animals This next series of posts will discuss open admission shelter capacity-related challenges, so I’ll start with what I observed to be challenge Number One, because it is the subtlest of them all and...
Second in a Series about Saving Chicago’s Healthy and Treatable Animals [caption id="attachment_14876" align="alignleft" width="225"] (Photo credit: The Amazing Josh Feeney)[/caption] Like those incredibly long and thin ladies sucking back cigarettes “tailored for the feminine hand,” would utter in bygone ads, Chicago has indeed “come a long way,...