Two shelter cats saved me from political hopelessness

America’s largest sanctuary for companion animals spans roughly six impeccably kept square miles of Angel Canyon, Utah, just north of Kanab, a town of about 5,000 near the Arizona border that bills itself as “magically unspoiled.” As we headed to our first volunteer shift at what Best Friends Animal Sanctuary calls Cat World, we passed signs for Dogtown, Horse Haven, Piggy Paradise, Bunny House, Parrot Garden, and a wildlife refuge, all the while surrounded by vast red rock vistas that seemed to stretch forever, as if we were on a not terribly exotic safari just off to the side of an ultra hi-def Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

My wife Gabi and I had picked the week of our volunteering visit at random, but it ended up being the perfect time to drop out of the world for a while. The news at the moment was a rare vintage of bleak, even more so than usual. Rampant mass shootings, inflation and Fed rate hikes, bad-faith culture wars heating up against women and trans people—all of it joining an international war, an unshakeable pandemic, and too much further turmoil to mention. Every possible solution to each urgent issue appeared either just out of reach or a foregone conclusion in the wrong direction. As we set out for the sanctuary, just about everyone I know seemed like they could use some sanctuary themselves.

The founders of Best Friends Animal Sanctuary bought this property in 1984, as a space for rehabilitating stray and abused animals into adoptability. Since then, the organization has grown into a national network of satellite outposts, and the sanctuary itself now holds 1,600 animals on any given day. The staff is only able to maintain such heavy volume with the help of volunteers, who come from near and far and in such numbers that the guest cabins are often booked out far in advance. Gabi and I couldn’t get one even with months of planning.

As we enter Cat World, a volunteer coordinator greets us, listing off the various houses where felines are grouped by their needs, noting which ones could use our assistance that day. Some of these houses are for cats who are incontinent, immobile, or have neurological issues; one is for cats with ringworm; another, for feline leukemia. The coordinator suggests that we help out at the Colonel’s Barracks, the house with the most highly adoptable residents. We walk along a dusty dirt road until arriving at a house decorated with a cartoon tabby in a combat helmet.

The work is challenging mainly in an olfactory sense. There’s just an incredible amount of cat poop to clean. Our respite and reward for the nasal assault comes from staffers encouraging us to stop and pet some cats whenever we feel like it. Socialization is an important part of helping out here, which means that we’re doing our jobs well when Gabi films several cats climbing my body like a tree for her Instagram. As volunteers, we’re technically allowed to borrow cats, dogs, and bunnies for sleepovers, to give the animals sustained exposure to people and to give people a dress rehearsal for potential pet adoption. Our Airbnb didn’t allow pets, though, so we packed as much socialization into our shifts as possible.

It is during these breaks that I sneak peeks at my phone. The news is uniformly and unfailingly bad. Lots of talk about “hardening” America’s elementary schools and what is to be done about protecting the bodily autonomy of more than half the population. (Apparently: nothing.) To contemplate any of this for even a brief moment was to feel despair. Then a mewling kitten would seize my attention again.

As soothing as Cat World could be, the most coveted volunteer shifts at the sanctuary, by far, are in Dogtown. Their popularity is either due to the namesake NatGeo show, which aired in the late-aughts and is still in reruns, or because dogs are just that popular overall. These shifts are much harder to land than those at, say, Bunny House, where we closed out our first day disposing of mercifully odorless poop pellets. When we show up at Dogtown the next morning, the coordinator asks if we’re returning a sleepover. She’s taken aback when we tell her about our Airbnb’s no-pets policy.

“I can’t believe you managed to find a place in Kanab that doesn’t allow sleepovers,” she says.

Over the next few days, we come to understand what she means. Utah is a deep-red state, but much of Kanab feels like an extension of the sanctuary itself. Drive around town and you’ll pass the Best Friends Roadhouse—a pet-centric hotel that offers guests courtesy sleepover animals—not too far from the Best Friends Fitness Center. A pizza restaurant nearby even has a meat-free entrée called Best Friends Delight. People around Kanab seem generally aligned with the sanctuary’s mission—and not just the ones who moved to the city to work here, as several people throughout the week mention they’d done.

But my reverie away from the real world could be pierced at any moment. Some folks in Kanab pointedly wear T-shirts promoting assault rifles—even as horrific news continues to emerge in the wake of the Uvalde massacre. (Unless they wear those shirts year-round, which they very well might.) The shirts remind me that the tangible compassion radiating throughout this town could always be compartmentalized: Someone who volunteers at the sanctuary might also own one of these shirts.

On Wednesday, I ask for a shift at one of the Cat World houses with less adoptable residents, and wind up at one for kitties with neurological conditions. As I portion liquid dinners into large plastic syringes, a staffer named Cheyanne asks if I would like to meet two of her favorite cats. Of course, I do.

Both Hudson and Nicky have cerebellar hypoplasia (CH), which limits their coordination almost entirely. Their bodies simply won’t do what they want them to do. Hudson, a gray domestic shorthair, lays on a wool blanket in the lobby, where Cheyanne tells me he spends all his time, only ever moving when she takes him outside to poop. Her other favorite cat, Nicky, is the opposite. He’s a perpetual motion machine—always moving but never getting anywhere. When I meet him on the patio, Nicky’s preparing to take a step. He’s shaky but determined, he almost had it, but then he falls on his little face. The setback doesn’t faze him in the slightest, though. His limbs flail while he is on his side, but he manages to roll back up into a standing position. Then he attempts another step, falling over again straight away. I admired his tenacity.

Toward the end of the week, I go on a solo outing with a friendly, slobbery mastiff mix named Calais. We walk along the Angels Overlook Trail, the canyon’s sandstone walls glinting in the distance, totally silent except for rustling sand. When I stop to take in the view at the highest point, Calais seems to take it in as well, though he’s probably just wondering when I would pour him some more water. Eventually, we discover Angels Rest—a sprawling, ornate cemetery for sanctuary animals and the pets of staffers, volunteers, and donors. It’s pristine and peaceful, with the soft cacophony of overlapped wind chimes humming in the breeze. I walk Calais through the wrought-iron entrance gate and among his departed peers, whose graves are marked by thick coral slates with slim name plates jutting up in front of them.

Here lies Gizmo, Fudgy, Whiskers: animals who found forever homes and are mourned by their families.

Here lies Kirby, Moe, Cutie: animals for whom the sanctuary became a forever home, and who are mourned by the staff and regular volunteers.

To be mourned is to be loved, and all the animals in this cemetery were loved in some way. Rather than end up anonymously incinerated in overcrowded shelters, they’re enshrined here and within someone’s happy memories. The difference between those two fates for any companion animal is only a matter of chance. It took decades of hard work to tilt the odds more in the animals’ favor.

Best Friends’s slogan is “Save Them All,” which sounds kind of naïve. Save them all? Millions of animals are born doomed to rough lives of cruelty and neglect—just like millions of humans—and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. The slogan isn’t some dewy-eyed dandelion-wish, though, to shield every last puppy from Earth’s vast and sundry horrors. Save Them All is just a concise way to express the group’s mission to eliminate kill shelters in the United States.

Incredibly, they might even succeed.

Around the time Best Friends opened in 1984, U.S. shelters were euthanizing 17 million dogs and cats every year. That figure has since fallen to about 355,000, according to Best Friends 2021 dataset. It’s still horrifically high for any animal lover, but the difference is staggering. While broad cultural shifts contributed to the drastic drop, animal activists might have been the tail wagging the dog, so to speak. Coming so far toward this impossible-sounding goal makes the idea of going all the way seem achievable. It’s an antidote to feeling like nothing matters anymore. Like humanity’s problems are beyond hope. Like being optimistic at all is empirically unrealistic.

Getting used to hopelessness as a fact of life in America is all too easy. The evidence of futility is front and center so often, I don’t even notice it much of the time. It’s just there, like the red rock canyons in Kanab that are stunning to look at until they barely register when we drive by them on Friday. It’s the very air we breathe. A news alert on my phone during one break details another mass shooting. I don’t receive any more alerts about the curtailment of abortion rights. It’s happening. No matter what I do—or what anyone else not currently on the Supreme Court does—nothing’s going to stop it. So why do anything?

Spending that week at the sanctuary, however, reminds me that transformative change has indeed happened before and can happen again. No matter how bleak things look at any time—and no matter the ultimate outcome—change hinges on the belief that it is possible.

As we leave the sanctuary for the final time, I am still thinking about those two cats, Hudson and Nicky, and the dueling ways in which they deal with the same neurological condition. They remind me of the parable that Christopher Walken’s character tells in the film Catch Me if You Can, about two mice who fall in a bucket of cream. One of the mice gives up right away and drowns, while the other struggles so hard, he churns the milk into butter and walks right out of the bucket. It’s a clever, folksy rebuttal to fatalism, but it’s also a little too neat.

What if the mouse who gave up didn’t drown, but instead lived a life of relative comfort, like Hudson the resigned lobby cat? What if the mouse who struggled didn’t get anywhere closer to making butter by the end of the story, like Nicky the floundering patio cat? Holding out hope for the impossible doesn’t seem much better than accepting the inevitable.

But it’s impossible to know what’s impossible until every possibility is exhausted. I certainly didn’t imagine during the summer that Congress would pass small but meaningful gun violence and climate packages, or that voters in deep-red Kansas would formally rebuke the Dobbs decision. It’s not enough, of course, but it’s a start. Americans may never fully achieve some of the many goals that seem as unlikely now as they are urgent and worthy of the effort. But maybe we will—even if it requires failing more times along the way than anyone could reasonably withstand.

Giving up on ever taking a step is out of the question, though. It’s better to keep falling down with hope than to never rise up at all.