BLOG: TAIL TALK
</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[Randolph County Humane Society is sponsoring multiple microchipping events in various locales in the upcoming months, so if your animals aren't microchipped and you've been watching the news lately you may realize why it's imperative you have your animals chipped now before it's too late. This week there was another round of killer tornadoes hit our area, devastating a town so close to us they are practically in our back yard. When I look at a field of debris where a neighborhood once stood, you know there are lives that have been destroyed that will never be put back as they were. Families have lost loved family members; husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons. But they also lost their four-legged family members, and during this time of grief it is a time when they need the comfort of their companion animals more than ever. If through some miracle their pet survived the utter devastation that hit their lives one February night but ran in the darkness from fear of the unknown, without any identification, they could be picked up by an animal control in another town where they wouldn't be recognized as the love monkey of a person that is suffering from the disaster that just devastated their town. In the State of Illinois animal control is allowed by law to euthanize an animal three (3) days after pickup if the owner can't be located, sooner if it is deemed to be sickly or a danger to the public or other animals. My best friend, Action Jackson, is epileptic, and without his medicine goes into cluster seizures that are horrific at best. He would be euthanized immediately under these rules. I have to do everything I can to protect him because without him my life will be less than what it is with him as part of it, and I need him with me. It's one thing when the day comes that he crosses the Rainbow Bridge with me there to hold him as he passes from the limit of my sight into the loving arms of all that I have known and loved that have gone on before me as they wait for the day when I join them and cross the Rainbow Bridge. But to have that decision taken away from me and done in a strange environment where he is penned up in a cage, afraid and wondering why we aren't coming for him, would probably be more than I could bear emotionally. I can hardly stand to think about it to write of it, that thought is such a nightmare in my psyche. So if you haven't taken the time, take a moment now to find a place that is having a microchipping event and have your pets chipped. You don't want to wait until you need it, you want to be prepared in all instances should the occasion arise should you need it. These aren't situations where you get do-overs. It's not golf and there aren't any mulligans. It's life and death for your pets, and if you're anything like me, the consequences could ultimately be death for you emotionally if you don't take care of business today before it's too late. There are some things I could never forgive myself for…
And never forget, it's only through you that the Randolph County Humane Society continues to save lives, one by one.