This afternoon, I was reminded that as humans, we are susceptible to making mistakes. Arriving home from a drive thru, I was shorted medium size tatter tots. Most mistakes are innocuous and cause little or no harm.
One of the greatest stresses of running an animal shelter is that you’ve entered a profession that has little room for mistakes. Mistakes can throw off drug counts, cause the over (or under) vaccination of an animal and can even cause the death of an animal. You cannot “undo” many of the mistakes that are available to us in this profession. As an old carpenter would tell you, “measure twice, cut once.” It doesn’t hurt to have three eyes on everything that you do.
There is nothing worse that to accidently euthanize an owner’s pet. For that reason, I would not allow any animal to be euthanized until I looked at the animal and checked it against our records. We live in a business in which there exist so many similar looking animals, that you can NEVER be too careful.