It's gotten so easy (if you own a smart phone) to communicate quickly with many other people. Remember back in June when Neda Aqa-Soltan was shot in Tehran and people recorded the event on their phones? The people who uploaded their footage onto YouTube have been awarded (collectively and anonymously) the 2009 George Polk Award for Videography, an award created in 1949 in honor of a CBS reporter who was killed while covering the civil war in Greece. There is actually some controversy about awarding to non-professional bystanders with cell phones, but the committee felt it was important to encourage brave acts of reporting and brave acts of uploading since in some countries like Iran you can go to jail (or worse) for performing acts that are considered to be against the country or God.
The video below shows how the same process was able to save a dog's life. It is certainly meant to tug the heart strings and I wonder about all the other animals in the shelter, but in the case of the main character it has a happy ending. I love the little tail wag part!
Darn! The video is no longer available. Visualize: a woman was recording her walk through the cages of an animal shelter when she came upon a cowering dog at the back of the cage who would only look down, too fearful to look up at her or anything else. The dog had scars and raw injuries and was undernourished. Nobody was looking at this dog as a potential pet. She used her smart phone to email, twitter, and FaceBook everyone she knew and asked them to spread the word about this dog, seeking donations and/or willing adopters. Time was running out - the dog was scheduled to die the next day if no one spoke for him. By 10:00 am the next day she had received enough financial support to take him to the vet and received the support of a rescue agency that would keep him until they could find him a home. You see her go back to the dog at the shelter, pet him, talk gently to him, give him a treat that he doesn't seem to know he's supposed to eat, and then lead him out to her car. She puts him in the back of a hatchback on a blanket, and gives him more lovin' and another treat. This time he seems to know that something good is happening to him and you see the tip of his tail give the tiniest of wags, the "little tail wag" I mentioned above.
It would've been much better if you could have seen the video yourself, but my point is not lost by its absence. Immediacy of communication saved that dog's life, that and the efforts of one very kind lady.
Oh YAY! I was able to find another copy of it. Let's see how accurate my memory is of the story:
Well, I got some of the little details wrong, but I did watch this over a month ago and saved it so I could blog about it later. Not bad.
1 comment:
It's true that electronic communication has really helped the rescue agencies network to help animals much better too. More animals can be placed in foster homes or adopted because of internet advertising and technologies, like microchipping your pets, can help lost animals find their homes again (if they are scanned by a vet or shelter). It's a great thing!
-Shirin
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