There
are many interesting people that come in and out of a veterinarian’s life and those
people teach us valuable life lessons.
We tend to assume that we are the teachers in the veterinarian/client
relationship however clients are often our BEST teachers. Teaching us
everything from humility to housekeeping.
There
was one wonderful client, who has since passed away, that I think about often. I think about her mostly when I have a
house cleaning or organizing job to do.
I never visited her home, but I always imagined that it was a
housekeeping disaster because she was a hoarder - a pigeon hoarder.
Mrs.
Poupak (not her real name) was a widow that lived with her adult son in a suburban neighborhood
near my veterinary hospital. She
maintained multiple bird feeders in her yard, which she would carefully fill
daily. I don’t think that she had a lot of money, but what she did have she spent
on her birds. The feeders were well attended and became so popular with the
neighborhood birds that the word soon leaked to the neighborhood hawk
population. The hawks learned that Mrs. Poupak’s bird feeders were a good place
to pick off a pigeon or two if they wanted squab for lunch.
Thus
our long veterinarian/client relationship began. As Mrs. Poupak’s backyard population grew, so did the
incidence of hawk attacks. She did
not want to feed the predators, so she took to watching her feeders “like a
hawk” and beating back the hawks if they happened to try to pick off one of her
precious pigeons. She would chase them down with an umbrella or tennis racket
to break the victimized pigeon out of the offending hawk’s grasp. Once she told me that she chased a hawk
for 6 blocks to get it to drop one of her backyard birds.
The
mental picture of this small woman running through her neighborhood with a
tennis racket screaming at a hawk flying overhead until she caught up to it,
then beating it into submission to rescue a pigeon is priceless.
As
she rescued the birds her indoor population of recovering pigeons grew and
grew. She took them in and brought
them to me, fixed them up and rarely let any of them go. She kept upwards of 40-50 pigeons living
free in her home and as pigeons will tend to do, they set up housekeeping and
started having baby pigeons, adding to her indoor population. She would bring
me one bird after another that had either been mangled by a hawk or her new
babies with a myriad of issues. I
knew that her health and her bank account would at some point collapse and I
worried about her situation, and told her so. We discussed that fact that she needed to stop collecting
birds, but she could not bring herself to let go of her pets and the population
started to control her.
At
some point, well into my relationship with her, the situation was discovered by
her daughter who forced her to give up most of her birds for her own health’s
sake. Many of them were released or re-homed and she was allowed
to keep only a few of her beloved pets leaving her somewhat heartbroken, but better off financially and physically. She lived the remainder of her life in a much cleaner environment with her children and a few of her pet birds.
Mrs.
Poupak’s hoarding situation taught me three valuable life lessons:
There
is an inverse relationship between quantity of things and joy, so let some of
your things go.
No
matter how much money you spend on a situation, if you cannot see it for what
it really is you may spend your life savings trying to fix it.
Too
much of anything is not good.
I
think of her fondly as I go about keeping my own house and space in order, and I
remember the lessons that her situation taught me. She had beautiful intentions of helping the birds, but in
the end her pigeon hoarding resulted in her home being condemned and her being
separated from many of her beloved pets.
“Sometimes
letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging
on.” Eckhart Tolle
Dr.
Julie Cappel
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