Charlene Needed a Place to Crash

TLAC has meant a lot to me over the years. It's where my family got our first dog, Cindy, who we called Puppy her whole life, when I was 7. After growing up and getting out into the real world, I found that I needed some stress relief after teaching middle schoolers all day so I started volunteering at TLAC in Oct of '03. Flash forward a year or so and after deciding that teaching middle school wasn't for me, I was looking for a new career. Volunteering with the dogs at TLAC made me realize how much I loved working with dogs and so off to school to become a dog trainer I went.

After graduating and getting a part time job at a local kennel I kept busy the other 20 hours a week volunteering with the TLAC dogs and helping to make revisions to the dog program. Somewhere in all that my husband and I adopted a lab mix, Maggie, and a black cat, Sushi, to be friends for our resident boxer, Osha, and cat, Buster. Unfortunately the new additions didn't get along so good with the resident dog and cat at home but we made it work and while the dogs never did get along, the cats now like to sit next to each other, without touching, most of the day.

As I got busier at work, training dogs 40-70 hours a week, I found myself migrating back to volunteering with the cats. They need so little attention in comparison to dogs and it wasn't a continuation of work for me. All they want is a little attention or lap time and then they go back to taking their nap. I always wanted to just bring a book and sit in a group room with a cat on my lap for an hour or so!

I was suckered into fostering my first and only cat recently. Charlene had been hit by a car and broken both of her back legs. She needed to be on crate rest for at least a month after her first surgery on one leg and after that we'd see if she needed surgery on the other leg.

It was a perfect fit because we'd lost our boxer earlier in the year and I thought it'd be great to have a kitten to love on but who couldn't interact with our other pets who really didn't want to add another cat in the house. Charlene was a charmer. The minute you walked into the room she'd start purring and keep it up the whole 15-20 minutes she had out of her crate a day for snuggle time. Turned out that she didn't need the second surgery on her leg and she found her forever home a whole lot sooner that we'd originally thought, too bad for us! She never stopped purring and it was so hard to give her up that I think she'll be my only foster story.

I continue volunteering and will be forever grateful that I can give back to the animals when they need it most. I've met a ton of great volunteers through the years as well. I hope to pass on the joy of volunteering to my future children and continue helping animals at the Austin Animal Center for years to come!
Jennifer Rockenbaugh