My name is Conor and I’m a Sophomore. My grades in school aint so good and if I hope to get into a half decent college, I have to get me some extra credit. That’s why I do volunteer work in an animal shelter after school. Here, people bring in all sorts of animals. Stray dogs, stray pets, stray everything. And you just gonna feel sorry for all those animals that people abandon, you know? Some of them are really fine animals. They don’t cause no problems, they don’t make no noise, and some of them are really quiet, you know. We try to clean them up as good we can and make them look good so people want to adopt them. And most of the time, good people come and get them. But we get more strays incoming everyday than we get outgoing. It gets mighty cold in winter here and I get shocked when I see animals shiver. Like very big, very hairy dogs shiver because of cold, you know. Because they get all this hair on their body and you think hair keeps them warm. But Jack says we have to use pet heating pad so they don’t freeze to death. Some community people give us donations and we bought a lot of pet heating pads. We don’t have enough for all our animals, but we make do with what we have, you know.
And we get different kinds of heating pads for pet with different ‘specs’ as Jack calls it. So I think I qualify to give advice to folks who want to buy pet heating pads. See, a good heating pad has to be waterproof, like, what if a dog spills water or pees on a heating pad with all the electric thingies inside? That’s bad, right? Some dogs really like to chew so if the heating pad has electrical cord, the dog can chew on it. If it is plugged and the dog chews on it, that’s problem. Some have cords that are really hard and dogs cannot chew through. Best thing though, is to stand watch if you wanna use one.
Some really good heating pads have covers that you can remove, wash and put back on. Then there are some you put in microwave ovens. You have to be mighty careful though, those ones can become hotter than is good for dogs and cats. Plus, pets can use the heating pads as cushions to just sit on.
After we bought the heating pads, the animals became warm and stopped shivering and it was really good to see them. I guess, in the end, it is important to be kind to animals, because they cant take care of themselves, you know. And if you can, try and donate to the nearest animal shelter. We really need all the help we can get.