Before you begin reading, I should warn you that this is long. As a writer, I’ve always had a tendency to be wordy (and moody). In fact, I can practically see the red pens of my former professors and everyone who helped shape my writing hovering over these paragraphs, eliminating unnecessary words, condensing thoughts, and reminding me that sometimes less is more. And perhaps they’re right. But today, I hope they’ll and you’ll forgive me. Because I’ve spent all day trying to find the words to express something that feels impossible to articulate, and even now, I don’t believe I’ve said enough or expressed my thoughts in enough detail. So today, the red pens can stay in their drawers. These lives deserve every single word. And I hope you’ll give them a few minutes of your time to read them. There are five dogs in Austin who could lose their lives tonight. Arlo, Furby, Sweet Pea, Simpson, and Truffle. Five lives. Five individuals. Five beings who have absolutely no understanding that somewhere, someone has decided their time on this earth may be over. As far as I know, Simpson, Arlo, and Furby have no rescue coming for them, the others have possibilities, though not set it stone. At Layla’s Heart Ranch and Rescue, we are desperately working to save Truffle. Not because his life matters more. Not because he is more deserving. But because his circumstances require a very particular kind of placement, and we are one of the very few rescues, if not the only one, capable of providing what he needs. And I cannot stop thinking about the others. How do we choose? How do we look into the eyes of one dog and say, “You deserve to live,” and look into the eyes of another and accept that they will die? How did we ever arrive at a place where this is a question we have to ask? I wish I knew how to make people care. Not the people who are already fighting alongside us. Not the rescuers, advocates, volunteers, and donors who are giving everything they have and more. I mean the people who look away. The people who scroll past. The people who have become so accustomed to animals dying in shelters that it no longer disturbs them. How do you make someone understand the value of a life when they have already decided it isn’t worth their attention? These are living, breathing, feeling beings. These are LIVES. They experience fear. They seek comfort. They form bonds. They trust. They love. They want to live. And their lives are being taken from them. Stolen. We have created language that makes this reality easier to accept. We call it humane euthanasia. We call it a necessary decision. We call it an unfortunate consequence of overcrowding. But when an animal who could have a future is killed because there wasn’t enough time, enough space, enough cooperation, or enough willingness to find another solution, I cannot call that mercy. This isn’t mercy. This isn’t humane. This is killing. And I am tired of being expected to make that truth sound less uncomfortable. We do what we can. We do more than we realistically can. We give pieces of ourselves that we don’t have left to give, because somewhere there is another animal whose life depends on someone refusing to give up. And still, it isn’t enough. It’s never enough. There is always another deadline. Another desperate plea. Another animal whose future depends on whether someone can accomplish the nearly impossible in mere hours. I cannot adequately describe the emotional warfare of being told that a life will end unless you can find the money, the space, the people, and the resources to save it before a deadline expires. Shelters call us rescue partners. Then let us actually be partners. Let us work together to find solutions where dogs get to live, rather than placing impossible deadlines and the weight of life and death decisions on rescues already stretched beyond their limits. We cannot call one another partners while operating as adversaries.