Marney Studaker-Cordner
Social worker/Clinical therapist and Animal rescuer/advocate. Published author in areas of parenting, self-help, children’s storybooks & contributing author to Empowering Parents website. I use humor and compassion to empower others.
Grizzly and Mr. Gooey
To love a rescuer, you must be a special type of person. You must be compassionate – because your rescuer will bring home every stumbled-across animal in need, from birds to bunnies to dogs. You must be tolerant – because your home will literally become a zoo. Your rescuer will assure you “it’s just for the night,” but a few months in, you will come to understand that while spoken with good intentions, there’s no way this will hold true. You must be willing to share – your bed, your money, your bathroom (which will inevitably serve as a night’s respite for a semi-feral cat, one that will claw the s#$* out of you at one o’clock in the morning if you brave a visit to said-bathroom). You must be strong – because you will see first-hand the sorrow and pain that rescue animals are going through as they are saved. You will watch your rescuer’s heart rejoice at the highest times – and break at the lowest. Most of all, you must be willing to share your rescuer, whose heart, time and money will be given to animals on a daily, if not hourly, basis. There is no “half-way” with a rescuer; it is all or nothing. Rescue is like the mafia – once you are in, you never get out. This is the truth of rescue: the guts underneath the glory.
Marney Studaker-CordnerPublished 5 months ago in Petlife
Second Chances
I hadn’t planned to rescue a dog that day. It was an ordinary day for me; a mid-January Wednesday, full of work, after-work errands and being tired. As it turns out, it was an ordinary day for the dog as well: full of hunger, cold, fear and being targeted by teenagers who thought it was fun to throw bottles at a stray. That our paths crossed was the only extraordinary part of the day – for either of us.
Marney Studaker-CordnerPublished 7 months ago in Petlife
