Hello, our wonderful, wonderful audience. Have a real treat for you today. I'm more excited than usual about today's guest. My wife is positively a Twitter. Some of you may remember that Ginger got her reform work started as an 11-year-old when she found some discarded kittens in a basket, and she and her mother bicycled down to the local animal shelter,

thinking they could leave the kittens with the shelter until they found out that the fate of these

kittens would be target practice on the railroad tracks behind the shelter shack,

or, more horribly, release into the adjacent garbage dump to be disposed

up by rats. Can you imagine a much more horrific thing for a child to be thinking about that the

kittens they rescued were going to be eaten alive by rats. Really amazing situation.

We ended up taking those.

It was a family of a mama and five kittens.

We ended up taking them to the nearest big town since the so-called animal shelter

for my little town turned out to be a shack that only accommodated a few

a few um be well beagle like but mostly hound like sad-eyed dogs who didn't look like

they were getting enough to eat.

So go ahead, sorry.

Well, Ginger devoted herself to drawing public attention to the shack,

and eventually she was actually put on a committee with veterinarians

whose goal was to plan a whole new building with better run by better principles.

And by the time she left for college, she had succeeded or were you at college when it was.

I had left home at that, and I had left home at that point.

My parents picked up the baton, as it were, and went ahead and finished raising the money and putting together

the humane society locally to raise the funds to build a perfect animal shelter in the early

60s, which was not adoption only, but it was so much more humane than what was there.

And so by the time I was about 21, there was a new animal shelter in Huntington, Indiana.

...