When arguing gets you nowhere | Column

Published: July 30, 2026

Updated: July 30, 2026

Category: Maine News

Author/Source: Jess Townsend - Pet Prattle

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Twenty years ago, in my first animal sheltering role, I learned how to get yelled at by customers.

My manager at the time, the inimitable Barb, brought me with her whenever she was called out to handle potentially volatile situations. Barb was like a lighthouse in a storm, with people’s discontent and enmity breaking in waves around her majestic height, moving her not an inch.

She would calmly wait out yelling and gesticulating until the upset patron let her speak to help them. Once she did, her tone never wavered, her volume never rose and she stayed perfectly calm.

Until recently, those skills learned from trailing after Barb served me well, and I’d like to think I also have a bit of my own magic to sprinkle on tense situations. However, it has slowly come to the forefront of my consciousness that upset patrons have changed and what used to work — actively listening, then offering the help we have available — no longer works. We cannot offer enough; people simply want more, and they cannot comprehend the limitations of nonprofit resources.

I was extorted for money by an adopter recently for veterinary bills she accrued after adoption. Threats against the organization were made, and the damage she could have done was not worth the fight over the several hundred dollars at issue. She signed a contract at the time of adoption indicating her full understanding of our process for issues arising post-adoption and of her financial responsibility for her pet post-adoption. It was a sobering and saddening conversation.

Animal shelters are not private veterinary practices. I’m not sure when the switch happened, but now it seems the public at large expects that shelters can do all of the medical work that can be paid for at a private practice. We cannot. We do not have hundreds or thousands of dollars to run tests on pets that present to us as healthy or make representations about their future health.

When an adopter demands reimbursement for their private veterinarian’s rates, we pay exponentially more than it would have cost us to perform the work in-house. There is a limit to what we can do and how much we can afford.

This adopter did not yell. She maintained a relentlessly pleasant demeanor with me, but she also did not respond to logic, reason or explanations of our resources and limitations, and her obligations as the legal owner of the pet. She wanted what she wanted and if I did not give it to her, she was going to exert herself against our organization in the court of public opinion.

I decided that the harm she could do to the animals who still needed our care was not worth standing on principle. We did nothing wrong and still ended up the losers, though not as badly as we could have been if we had not acquiesced.

I feel vaguely nostalgic for the days when the staff would come get me for an upset patron and I could let them get out what they needed to say, give them space to calm down and then have a reasonable conversation. There is something far worse in the interactions with those who are not moved even slightly by the idea of taking advantage of a nonprofit and taking money or resources from homeless animals that need them.

I am not a sociologist and would never pretend to be, but I am concerned that we are at a societal point where things like this are occurring. Is it because social media gives everyone an un-fact-checked opportunity to sound off? Is it because so few interactions are done face-to-face these days? I don’t know, but it unsettles me for the future.

Jess Townsend is executive director of Midcoast Humane, an animal shelter based in Brunswick.