Poop is the stuff dreams are made of. This is the literal truth for Tabby’s Place staff and volunteers. Seriously. Also, ew.

It wasn’t terribly long ago that I had a dream about cleaning up poop: gloves on, floor wipe ready to pick up and swoosh clean with one motion, glove inside out over offending morsel, toss in trash. Mundane at best. Also, a true story.

IRL (in real life) one day, after cleaning up poop in the Tabby’s Place lobby, I mentioned the dream to the terrific Tiana, famed for foster-lead fabulosity. She said that she too dreams of poop.

We are not alone.

As with all things at Tabby’s Place, there is no such thing as anything that anyone is the only one to experience, to be responsible for, or to do. This is an important truth for making decisions. No one person has to carry that weight entirely alone, no matter how minor the decision, and no matter if the weight is as weighty as Bello. Tabby’s Place, in fact, is a place where most weights are rendered minimal, if not exactly inconsequential, because of the number of hands who are ready, willing, and able to help with the heavy lifting.

Numbering an even 2 dozen, full-time and part-time staff shoulder many responsibilities. If you’ve been following the blog, you understand the full scale of regular weights and measures nails. Clipping claws is at the very tip of an iceberg of wound care, behavior management, clinical diagnostics, medication dosing, and very much more. At the foundation of this weighty pyramid lies poop.

Ensuring any given space has the correct litter (all non-clumping, sometimes soil topped, some basic clay, some schmancy) in the properly proportioned boxes (tall, shallow, small, extra large, and so on) is enough to keep heads spinning. Watching diets, replacing overly-dented pans, and maintaining sufficient supplies are all part of the litter box challenge. Daily scraping, washing, sanitizing, drying, and refilling generally falls to the lot of lots of volunteers. Monitoring is the lot of everyone.

Eyes everywhere remain alert to litter box fails (Juel, my Jujube, seriously? Still? Always?) and questionable content or mishaps, including wall smears. (Tootsie is adorably incontinent and sometimes backs up a little too far in her playful enthusiasm. As with all of the creatures of Tabby’s Place, Tootsie is not alone). If a diet needs to be adjusted, poop is often the first alert. Routine medical care? See what’s in the poop. New cat in intake? Check the poop (and pretty much absolutely everything else possible). There is a Slack channel where volunteers can notify staff about any potential, non-urgent veterinary issues. The number of poop photos is astounding! That brings us back to EW! Yet, the pictures can be helpful, if not strictly necessary vis-a-vis a verbal description: loose poop, pale poop, bloody poop, poop in a surprising place like a sink.

With poop being so foundational, it should be unsurprising that it features in our nighttime defragging. What happened today? Poop. How is the day processed? Through REM sleep. And, that, dear Tabby’s Place family, is why poop has become the stuff of dreams.

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