But every now and then something comes along that even reaches through to touch the heart of this most jaded of souls.
Operation Happy Sock (OHS) is a brilliantly simple program that matches together Girl Guides, who ordinarily have nothing better to do than to help people, with the more urgent needs of cats in shelters. And OHS recycles, too!
You see, we’re all lost socks in the laundromat of time (with apologies to Biff) and we all have odd socks in our drawers. Send your odds socks to OHS and its founder, Martha Powers, will stuff ’em with a special catnip concoction and she will make sure that cats in cages will cuddle up with their very own Operation Happy Sock.
And this is where the Girl Guides come in. Bless ’em.
They have to do things to win Brownie Points. And what better way is there than making cats happy? Herndon, VA-based Girl Scout Troop 6388 collected unwanted socks from friends and family members and converted them into catnip toys by stuffing them with catnip and fiberfill, then tying a knot in the ankle. But instead of a local shelter the girls sent their OHS consignment to the PAWS shelter in Kuwait.
“Homeless cats deserve a little fun,” said troop leader Cheryl Marcey, “but we learned that many shelters have no budget for buying toys for the animals. When we heard about the PAWS shelter in Kuwait, we thought they were especially deserving.”
The Grumpy Vegan thinks it’s time for all of us to, er, step in. Let’s send catnip-filled socks to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and to the Hezbollah leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. Methinks that there are quite few others who I would also like to send them to.
Don’t we all each need a Happy Sock to cuddle up with from time to time?
