Saving a starfish

“We cannot do big things, only small things with great love” – Mother Theresa.

I have been often asked, in my years of saving animals, big or small, why don’t I prioritise? Is it worth going all out to save one animal when it costs so much, especially the serious cases? Wouldn’t it be wiser (read: more cost-effective) to utilise the money to save more animals whose treatments don’t cost as much? And, is it worth saving a stray animal’s life? After all, it’s just a stray…

I don’t know what is “wiser”?

But I do know this one thing, and that is this – Every life is precious. And while we humans can rationalise because we understand, and we can sometimes be selfless enough that we do not want others spending money on us, can animals do the same? I have looked into the eyes of animals, and what I hear is, “Please save me, please help me…”

Many people do not agree with me, and that’s alright. It is not a matter of who is right or wrong. It is a matter of looking deep into your heart, and…knowing, in that instant, that you must do what your heart tells you to.

I reproduce here, a short article I had written some time ago:

In our quest to save lives, especially the little kitten or puppy from the drain or the lizard crawling by the roadside, sometimes we stop to wonder… There must be thousands, or millions who suffer the same plight as this one…

How many can we help?

Yet we must.

This reminds me of the story of the little boy who was saving starfish on the beach. Thousands were stranded and he was picking them up one by one, and throwing them back into the sea. An adult walked past and stopped to watch the little boy.

“What are you doing?” the adult asked.

“I’m saving the starfish”, the boy answered.

“But there are so many of them! How many can you save? Would it make any difference??” the adult asked.

“It would… to this one”, the boy answered, as he threw another starfish back into the sea.

Little things DO matter.

Children have a wisdom far less tainted than the adults’. They act from their hearts, and they just know what to do.

The starfish deserves to be saved, as do the little puppy or kitten in the drain, the lizard by the roadside, the thousands of baby chicks, piglets and their parents in the factory farms, and the starving children in poor countries.

All life is precious.

Let us not discriminate.

“I could not have slept tonight if I had left that helpless little creature to perish on the ground.” (Reply to friends who chided him for delaying them by stopping to return a fledgling to its nest.) – Abraham Lincoln

“Life is life’s greatest gift. Guard the life of another creature as you would your own because it is your own. On life’s scale of values, the smallest is no less precious to the creature who owns it than the largest.” – Lloyd Biggle Jr.

“If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.” – St. Francis of Assisi

And while we strive to spay and neuter as many stray animals as we can, for every animal that we spay/neuter, we are already indirectly “saving” thousands of lives. It doesn’t matter that we might not have statistics to prove that we have made a difference in the years to come. All that matters is that we know, that that one single animal that we have saved is a precious life saved.

We have made a difference.

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