Homeless

Of Humans and Animals

Anonymous — Sat, 01 Dec 2018 19:00:00 +0000

Of Humans and Animals Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 12/01/2018 - 12:00

Eric Gershon

Inquiry: Leslie Irvine

�� Boulder sociologist Leslie Irvine, author of My Dog Always Eats First, studies the relationships between humans and their pets.

Should people keep pets? Is there an argument against it?

There is, and I’ll make this argument even though I am surrounded by cats and a dog: It is a relationship of captivity. It involves deciding at some point that this other species exists for our entertainment and our pleasure.

You referred to several cats and a dog...

My husband and I have two cats and a dog. All of them from the Humane Society of Boulder Valley, where I’ve been a volunteer for 20 years. Our crew is down from an all-time high of five cats and two dogs. It’s considerably easier at the moment.

What does the term “pet” imply about the relationship between person and animal?

We would never eat them.

‘Adopt rather than shop’ is my message.

Is the human-pet relationship generally a good deal for the pets?

I think so, assuming no abuse and assuming adequate veterinary care and all the other things an animal needs for quality of life — good diet, plenty of exercise. An ability to exercise natural behaviors.

Are we aware of any species other than humans that keeps pets?

There’s the famous gorilla — Coco the gorilla had a kitten. But this was given to her by human beings.

So, we’re the only animal that keeps other animals around for this kind of social relationship.

That’s right.

What does that reflect about us?

First, you can say it reflects our capacity to dominate other species. On a more positive side, it says something about our capacity to relate to others, and by others I mean other beings, not just other humans. In our relationship with animals, we stretch our interactional capabilities. Dog-human friendship isn’t a replacement for human friendship — it’s essentially a different kind of a relationship.

Let’s talk about your book My Dog Always Eats First, in which you explored relationships between the homeless and their pets. What did you learn?

I was sure that the most interesting thing was going to be finding out how homeless people managed to provide food and care for their animals. And, actually, providing food was the least of their concerns. People on the street were coming up to them and giving them bags of food. And most food banks and soup kitchens are now providing pet food. The thing I thought was going to be the most interesting turned out to be the question that had the most straightforward answer.

How do you feel about zoos?

In general, I don’t like them. I don’t like captivity. But I do see that, in some instances, they’re doing some good educational things and some good conservation efforts. And I’m not in favor of the kind of breeding that takes place in zoos, because it’s a very restricted gene pool. I’m not in favor of capturing wild animals anymore. I would like to see zoos phased out. This menagerie was an 18th, 19th-century invention.

Is keeping a single pet at home really that much different from having a one-animal zoo?

Philosophically, no. It’s keeping an animal to look at, keep us company, entertain us — keeping an animal for our pleasure.

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the grief many people feel when a pet dies…

Our responsibility for their care makes their deaths feel like something that we could have prevented, to some degree. So, there’s a lot of responsibility tied up in death. Did I do the right thing? Did this animal have a good life?

What are you working on these days?

Research that examines the roles of animals in social problems we generally think of as solely human. This refers back to some of my work on animals and disasters. I did the research following Hurricane Katrina, when it suddenly and very powerfully came to people’s attention that we have to plan for companion animals in a disaster, or people are not going to evacuate. People are going to go back into evacuated areas to rescue their pets. There’s going to be psychological costs of leaving them behind. There’s going to be public health issues.

Is there anything else you’d like to say about the human-animal relationship?

The need to adopt rather than breed dogs and cats. I hope that we can do away with things like puppy mills within my lifetime. I guess ‘adopt rather than shop’ is my message.

Do you see that primarily as a moral imperative, or a practical need?

Both. When I travel — a lot of vacations, I visit the local shelters. And I realize the practical need.

Condensed and edited.

An extended audio version is available under podcasts at colorado.edu/coloradan.

Illustration by Alison Seiffer

�� Boulder sociologist Leslie Irvine, author of My Dog Always Eats First, studies the relationships between humans and their pets.

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Grit

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 08:51:00 +0000

Grit Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 03/01/2017 - 01:51

Eric Gershon

The first night Megan Mangum was homeless, she slept in a park. It was a Wednesday in the middle of November in the mountain town of Idaho Springs, west of Denver. She was 15 and already working three jobs to help pay her way in the world.

Family life was tense, she said, sometimes worse.

“I thought the best thing for me to do was to be homeless,” she said.

In all, Mangum (IntPhys, MS’17), who’s 5’2” with crystal blue eyes and bubbly by nature, lived without a home for more than three years. She slept in a skateboard park and down by Clear Creek, in an old train car and in a silver 1995 Chevy Lumina she bought before she had a driver’s license. She found overnight babysitting jobs. She housesat. She couch surfed. On a few bone-chilling nights, she took shelter in dumpsters.

Some offers of refuge she refused because of the strings attached.

All the while Mangum was doing everything she could to get an education, balancing long hours of restaurant and lifeguard work with the demands of community college courses she’d been taking online, and paying for herself, since she was 14.

“Without school,” she said, “nothing was going to happen with my life.”

Megan Mangum dreamed of college. She’s leaving with two degrees.

Now 26, Mangum is on track to graduate from �� Boulder with two degrees, a bachelor’s and a master’s, both in integrative physiology, plus a certificate in public health. She’s preparing for the MCAT and contemplating a future of real possibilities that once were mere fantasies. Most scenarios combine medical training with public policy work — a job with the Centers for Disease Control, perhaps, or the World Health Organization.

Not so many years ago, when Mangum was doing homework in her car outside Starbucks at 2 a.m., because the car was home and the wireless was free, a life of promise was an urgent hope and a distant prospect.

“There is no rational explanation as to where she unearths inspiration to improve, drive and overcome,” said Monica Hickox (MechEngr, MS’15), a housemate and close friend. “She is a fascinating study on the ‘nurture vs. nature’ front, because there was no nurture to instill the ‘fight like hell’ attitude.”

From her earliest days, Mangum liked learning. She was the kid who read dictionaries and encyclopedias straight through and started algebra in fourth grade. She read Little Women and Nancy Drew and, just because it was the longest book she’d ever seen, Moby Dick. She loved animals and imagined becoming a veterinarian.

No one in her family had been to college or aspired to it for her, she said. If college was the goal, getting there would be on her. The route was hazy, as it often is for first-generation students.

Either way, there's gonna be a 'Dr.' next to my name."

So Mangum eked out a living in small mountain towns while taking classes at Red Rocks Community College in Golden. Night school allowed her to work during the day, at restaurants and swimming pools. She paid tuition out of pocket, on a monthly plan. At work she got free meals and showers.

There were times when she had $5 a week for food and times she spent it on gas instead. She drove to school in weather that should have kept her off the roads.

The first time she missed a class, she said, “I cried all night.”

At 18 Mangum took a tiny studio apartment in Idaho Springs. She called it “The Cave.” There was no bed, no heat, no bathroom door and a raccoon in the wall. But it wasn’t the street or a car or a borrowed bed; it was hers.

In time, Mangum began taking classes at �� Denver, in nursing, in addition to community college classes. She got an internship at Swedish Medical Center, became certified as an EMT, then as a paramedic.

She and a friend took an apartment together, a better one. Mangum left school so she could do the internship, keep working and push toward a shortterm goal: “Saving, saving, saving.”

She met a science-minded boy, began a relationship and resumed her march toward a four-year degree.

In 2013, with two associates degrees already in hand, she applied to �� Boulder, where her boyfriend was entering a doctoral program. She wasn’t sure how she’d pay for it. At 22 and estranged from her family, she still wasn’t old enough then to apply for federal financial aid on her own.

But she remembers thinking, “If I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do this.”

Admitted in April 2013, she exulted: “I couldn’t stop smiling.”

She took out her first loan and started paying it back immediately.

That August she entered a �� Boulder classroom as a student for the first time. It was a 9 a.m. Spanish section. She’d been doing college-level work for most of nine years and never been to class in daylight.

The romance didn’t work out, a bitter disappointment. But �� Boulder proved a revelation.

She encountered refreshingly foreign worlds and people and disciplines. She befriended chemical engineers and MBAs, musicians and anthropologists and war veterans becoming scientists. She joined a spring break service trip to Los Angeles, where she and other students volunteered in a soup kitchen and tutored kids on skid row. She found study-buddies and played intramural soccer and water polo.

“I had never been in a situation where my friends, who were also my peers, had this level of education,” she said. “When I was going to night classes, I just didn’t have time to make friends.”

Mangum has discovered strengths she didn’t know she had.

“I had a professor tell me, ‘People listen to you, people follow you and people want to work for you. Use that for good and don’t take that for granted.’”

Even amid better circumstances, she fears poverty. She likes to tell a story about the first time she heard from the �� Boulder bursar’s office. She didn’t open the email for days, terrified it was a bill she hadn’t anticipated and couldn’t afford. It turned out to be a scholarship, the first in a series. They eased her burdens and also gave her a sense of being wanted.

“Until getting here,” she said, “I was the only one rooting for me.”

In addition to being a full-time student, Mangum still works long hours most weeks, many of them at a Pearl Street Starbucks, where she’s a morning shift supervisor. On average, she sleeps between four and five hours a night. Last semester she took epidemiology, immunology, public health and medical sociology. She’s seeking a translator’s certificate in Spanish to set herself up for international work.

The goal was college; getting there was up to her. The route was hazy and often is for first-generation students.

Mangum has been invited to tell her story in public several times. She does it with a disarming mix of candor, humor and optimism. Rooms fall silent. Hearts melt. People rise to their feet and clap.

They approach afterward, business cards in hand.

“Those are things that wouldn’t have happened unless I came here,” she said.

Sometimes students come up to her, too: “I thought I was the only one who was a poor kid here,” they say.

Today Mangum lives in a house in South Boulder, the same one for nearly three years now, shared with five roommates, a mix of fellow students and young alumni. They study engineering, music, education. They talk ideas, football, the rent, the future.

When Mangum first moved in, Hickox recalled, “Cookies with ‘I can’t wait to meet you all after my schedule isn’t so nuts’ notes stuck on them would appear in the kitchen overnight.”

Mangum takes nothing for granted and is dismayed when others seem to.

A classroom clicker survey about Colorado’s minimum wage prompted her to speak up one day: Few classmates had any idea what it was.

“I raised my hand,” she said. “The minimum wage is $8.31 in the state of Colorado. It hasn’t always been over eight dollars. It was stuck at $7.78. And waiters and waitresses make this…” (It rose to $9.30 on Jan. 1.)

Many of Mangum’s campus friends also have nontraditional backgrounds. Lots are military veterans. They’re comrades in duress and companions in delight. She and her pal Brandon, a Navy vet, attended every �� home football game last season. Her phone’s lockscreen is a picture of Chip.

Megan Mangum hasn’t mapped out her future in permanent marker. It’s a luxury of her improbable new life that she faces some good choices.

Like whether to apply to medical school, a doctoral program or both.

“Either way,” she said, “there’s gonna be a ‘Dr.’ next to my name.”

It’ll be a lot more work. But Mangum finds comfort in forward momentum.

“I’m almost afraid to stop,” she said.

Eric Gershon edits the Coloradan

Note: This story has been updated from the version that appeared in print.

Photos courtesy Glenn Asakawa and Megan Mangum

For some students, the hardest part of college is getting there. Ask Megan Mangum.

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Editor's Note - Winter 2012

Anonymous — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 07:00:00 +0000

Editor's Note - Winter 2012 Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 12/01/2012 - 00:00

Tori Peglar

In this issue associate professor Leslie Irvine reveals an unusual source for restoring a sense of purpose and dignity among the nation’s homeless — pets. From Boulder to Miami Irvine spent time on the streets and found that pets spurred transformative behavioral changes in their homeless owners [pages 26-29]. Her work reminded me of Warren, the first homeless person I met.

I was 10 when I stumbled upon Warren while playing in the ring of woods adjacent to my house. Dressed in black, he was digging through an unkempt pile of branches, looking for a tuba he had buried when he was a kid.

Warren had grown up nearby, but my dad told us he had fought in the Vietnam War and it had changed him. One day we found Warren sleeping in our barn. My mom called the police.

I watched through the family room window as the two cops led him up our driveway, past our flowering dogwood tree to their car. They talked to him as if he were an irritating friend from high school who always made the same mistake. His sand-colored hair looked like it had never been combed.

Where would he go after they dropped him off at the edge of town? Even as a child, I knew Warren had lost more than his tuba. He had lost his dignity, and nothing he found in our woods was going to bring it back.

For months, I paused with trepidation before entering our barn or the woods, scanning the area for Warren. More often, as I hopped over fallen trees and leaf piles, I caught myself looking for the glimmer of a shiny gold tuba. I never found it. It, like Warren, was gone.

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Jackson Fosters Hope for the Homeless

Anonymous — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Jackson Fosters Hope for the Homeless Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/01/2010 - 00:00

Beth Phillips

Vicki, a petite 18-year-old with bleached-blond hair and wide brown eyes, was desperate when she met Anthony Jackson (Bus’05). After aging out of the foster care system, she was living in Denver — and was homeless. For months she slept on whatever couch she could find. Although she dreamed of getting a job and going to college, she was more concerned with finding a home.

Anthony works for the Mile High United Way’s Bridging the Gap program and administers Section 8 Family Unification Program housing vouchers. These 18-month vouchers help former foster youth who lack adequate housing become independent.

“Forty percent of foster youth experience homelessness in their lifetime,” Anthony says, blaming this alarming statistic on the instability of foster care, an imperfect system that bounces youth between placements. “To move 20 times, you don’t have a home. There’s nothing stable about that.”

He spends countless hours helping foster youth avoid homelessness at all costs, mediating between angry landlords, exhausted caseworkers and frustrated youth. Anthony manages youth enrollment in the program, the ever-growing wait list and housing inspections. His least favorite aspect is paperwork, averaging around 250 pages per youth. He spends his remaining time tackling crises. Each morning his voice mail is filled with emergencies ranging from landlords who need their rent money to youth facing eviction.

“�� helped me figure out who I was and how to succeed at a role like this,” Anthony says.

All his hard work is worth it when he sees a youth get his or her first set of apartment keys.

“The excitement they have when they sign their lease and move into their apartment is what makes this job so easy for me,” Anthony says. “They now know they have a place to call home and no longer have to deal with couch surfing and possibly being kicked out of their place.”

Family Unification vouchers provide hope and a safety net for youth like Vicki.

“It adds a great deal of stability to their lives. At least for 18 months they can call that their home,” Anthony says.

In the meanwhile, Vicki is working hard to reach her goals. Six months after receiving her voucher, she is in a better place: living in her own apartment, attending school and finally finding permanency.

Stories like Vicki’s are common in Anthony’s world, which lead him to say, “I’ve never had greater job satisfaction.”

Anthony works for the Mile High United Way’s Bridging the Gap program and administers Section 8 Family Unification Program housing vouchers.

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Homeless

Of Humans and Animals

Inquiry: Leslie Irvine

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Grit

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Editor's Note - Winter 2012

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Jackson Fosters Hope for the Homeless

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