Reader Responds -- Elizabeth Duvall

Let me see if I got this straight:

Carol Prager (“Keep a tight rein on board, T-shirts,” News-Press, May

30) admitted to receiving nothing but courtesy from the Glendale Humane

Society staff, and yet, while on a shopping trip that admittedly had

everything to do with buying merchandise and nothing at all to do with

the true purpose of any shelter -- connecting homeless and abandoned

companion animals with the people who might potentially adopt them -- she

encountered an unpleasant bit of behavior from a board member. That will

now result in her punishing the shelter -- more specifically the animals

-- by withholding her financial support of them.

Am I losing my mind, or is this really Ms. Prager’s line of reasoning?

She makes no reference whatsoever to having stopped in (as long as she

happened to be in the building) to bond with the shelter’s only reason

for being: the animals. Does she truly believe her decision not to renew

her membership will properly chasten the errant board member into

becoming a more diplomatic and socially skilled human being? (If only

retraining others’ behaviors were that easy!)

I made my living for many years making customer service training films

for a top department store chain, so I feel I’m especially sensitive to

rude service. But I don’t go to the Glendale Humane Society to be

charmed; as a foster mom for the shelter, I’m there for the animals, not

the people, and while I do sincerely deplore bad service from any

establishment, the fact remains that not only did Ms. Prager receive

excellent and attentive service from the shelter itself, she is also

holding the animals’ well-being hostage to her assessment of one solitary

board member’s manners.

Why punish the animals when it’s a board member who insulted her?

Where’s the logic, or the compassion, in taking out her “quiet seething”

on cats and dogs? Ms. Prager’s is exactly the kind of vengeful, punitive,

short-sighted attitude of misdirected anger that I see every single day

in the pages of the News Press, on every topic imaginable, and it makes

me despair for our own species.

As a foster mom for the shelter, I myself don’t see any connection at

all between the three tiny newborn kittens I’m bottle-feeding every

couple of hours and how I might be spoken to by some random board member.

Would I enjoy being spoken to rudely by some representative of the

shelter? Of course not. Would I then decide to take it out on the

helpless kittens in my care? Of course not. Their urgent need to be

intensively cared for by me, for a dauntingly intensive seven weeks or

so, is completely unrelated to my estimation of the appropriateness of

the behavior of any human being I might encounter at the shelter.

One thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other, but as long as

people continually choose to lash out at the wrong target -- well, just

look at the world around us.

ELIZABETH DUVALL

Glendale