A Wing and a Prayer

Or when nothing goes to plan but you get shit done anyway

Waggley Tail Club Pyjama List:

Yoda – yellow with blue alligators

Cheetah Girl – Chanel style quilted black satin with faux fur collar

Gypsy – Retro stripes with zip back

Trick – Blue hearts (he will bite you if you don’t give him a treat first)

Posy – Pink fleece

Spike – Green Puffa if it’s very cold, or Star Wars cape

The list goes on. The Waggley Tail Club are heading into winter with stylish wardrobes, warm beds and a plethora of medication and supplements to keep their creaky old joints working throughout the cold months. 17 year old Granny is carried out into the morning sun by gentle careful hands so that she can lie on her orthopaedic bed and hurl shrill spittle specked insults at the staff and dogs passing by on their daily business. Her equally obstreperous daughter Fox, brick shaped and coloured, provides the muscle. Their day will unfold with the predictable reassurance of routine – breakfast, naps, treats, grooming, slow walks, perhaps a donkey to heckle. There’s the excitement of Vin’s arrival every afternoon with the swaggering huskies, the bright expectation of dinner preparation and then the gum smacking deliciousness of consuming it, the fleecy comfort of their pyjamas and a last kiss on their beloved grey faces as everyone settles in for the night, their breathing intertwined with mine, all the love passing back and forth between us.

Amanda coordinating treats and pyjamas time

There are 120 dogs on our waiting list for sterilisation. A shortage of anesthesia drugs meant that for a few weeks we could not do any sterilisations, but still dogs kept arriving at Doggy Tuesday in need of this life changing operation. Most people do not want their dogs to breed, but they don’t have any access to affordable care. So we do what we can with what we have, as we have done for 14 years, and we make every dog matter - every big eared long legged dog, the brown dogs, the dogs with curly tails, the dogs striped like tigers and the dogs with ridges on their backs, the pot-bellied puppies with their tails thin as string and the old dogs with their scars and rough paws and wise and beautiful faces.

We vaccinate and we sterilise, keep the dogs parasite free, feed them from the All Day All You Can Eat Doggy Buffet every Tuesday and send them home with supplementary food packs. When dogs arrive limping or with bites from a fight, or a broken leg from being hit a car, a splenic tumour, mange and hot spots and dental issues, ripped up by baboons or wild pigs or barbed wire fences, poisoned or beaten or burnt, we provide whatever treatment they need.

As winter brings sharp bright mornings and the cold starry glitter of clear night skies, some of our animals begin the slow process of hibernation. There are secretive bristles of hedgehogs curled up in fragrant hay, and tortoises parked haphazardly in the flower beds. The exotic birds wake up later and come back in to their draught free bird room earlier in the afternoon before the sun throws a long dark shadow across the garden. We prepare Kadiki’s winter bed with a thick pile of hay and she follows the sun to settle in a pool of light with a contented grunt and a luxurious flexing of her fluffy toes.

There is mist on the dam most mornings, and the pied kingfishers hover like phantoms above the dark mirror of the water, shattering it with sharp beaks as they snatch a silver scaled bream fingerling for breakfast. Marble, the neat tabby cat who devoted her early years to raising our baby monkeys, yawns and stretches on top of the wood owl enclosure where she spends her nights from choice, rather than in the cozy tangle of cats on the couches and beds in the volunteer house.

There’s a new arrival – a barn owl collected yesterday from Lonely Park Farm on the other side of Goromonzi town. He was weak and dehydrated, unable to fly but this morning he is brighter. I hope we can send him back for release soon – barn owls are tricky patients with their lightning fast, razor sharp talons and they are pretty stinky too!

Already there is a team at work on the fencing for the new dog yard. This is going around the container build we have been working on for 5 months (torrential rain, power outages, war all putting a spanner in the works). This will eventually be an extension to our hospital. We have to fence the area before we put in the glass doors and the windows because if Eugene, our 800 kilogram bovine bulldozer sees his face reflected in the glass, he will immediately assume it is a rival to be headbutted and tossed aside on his devil horns. We learnt our lesson after he had a good go at vanquishing our new 50 000 litre steel water tank.

The fence is also going up around the cattery extension, after waiting weeks for the right wire to be available, and sound of a brush cutter chomping through a wild tangle of undergrowth in what will be Sylvie the serval’s new habitat carries across the road to where we are feeding Zelda the zebra and her donkey friends, Victoria and Jean. Last month was a really tough month with the drastic jump in the fuel price, and we bought feed from a different supplier because it was cheaper. These 3 equines, who previously subsisted on scraggly bush grass in their former lives, were appalled! ‘We’re not eating this!’ they declared, curling their lips and jutting their hairy chins, turning their backs on the feed station and presenting 3 very broad bottoms to us, tails twitching with displeasure. ‘Economise on someone else!’. This went on for several days, and now the bottoms were rather less broad, so the truck was dispatched to buy the preferred food and I did sums that wouldn’t add up and scratched at the red wheals that popped up on my hands from anxiety and then checked my messages to see that a local company would be making a monthly donation to the sanctuary. This is how we’ve got along, for so long, on a wing and a prayer, on unexpected kindness, with good people who believe like us that every animal matters.

Darling Tinki, who got a second chance because he matters

When you get to teatime and the most dramatic thing that’s happened so far is Amanda deciding to slip a bit of Didgeridoo music into Kadiki’s playlist and causing a massive feline hissy fit, we’re doing pretty well. (In all fairness to Kadiki, she had just listened to Julio Eglasias, and the DJ had made no effort whatsoever to bridge the cultural gap.)