The Ugly Volvo is a blog by writer and stand-up comic Raquel D’Apice. Recently she posted a powerful open letter containing 10 apologies.

They’re all to her dog Tig, for the sharp decreases in Tig’s quality of life since a baby arrived – the curtailed walks, the lack of personal attention, the delayed mealtimes, and the OUTRAGEOUS FAVORITISM shown to one who can’t even wag its tail or lick its own chops, let alone walk on a leash.

Uh huh. Who ya gonna shake hands with first?

All this even though Tig is a very good dog.

The apologies are heartfelt. D’Apice says she’s sorry. For what she did. And does. Which she doesn’t skate past, but lists and describes.

She doesn’t let herself off the hook. In apology #3, she discusses unequal treatment of dog and baby. “I’m sorry that he pulls on your ears and grabs hold of the fur on your face and yet, when you try to break free by licking him, we shout, ‘Tig, stop licking!’ It’s a giant double standard. I want to rationalize it by saying something like, ‘Yes, but you have big teeth and sharp claws,’ but if I’m going to be totally honest with myself, I have four different scratch and bite marks on my face and arms and you are not responsible for any of them.”

Not to mention the grossly inequitable treatment of poop incidents.

You don’t want the baby sitting there with a dirty face, do you?

“I’m sorry that the two times in your entire life that you pooped in the house I LOST MY FREAKING MIND OVER IT, and yet every other day the baby sh*ts on the floor while urinating all over my bathrobe and I just sort of sigh and walk listlessly out of the room. I do not yell at the baby and point to his poop and say ‘No!’”

She takes responsibility, but can’t say much will change.

“I’m sorry that sometimes I can tell you have to pee but I can’t take you outside because the baby’s sleeping and I can’t leave him alone in the apartment while I go out to take you for a walk. That is one of the rules of having an apartment.”

I apologize to Felix every time I leave the house without him. His expectations are always high.

However, some commenters note that things will get better when the baby starts being served solid food. Dog love the open-handed joy that is a child in a high chair. “You dropped some Cheerios! I am on it! Splat and hurray for oatmeal! Wow, what’s this? Strained beets? Well, oKAY! OMG, rice cakes! Hey KID, KID, KID! DROP ME A GOLDFISH!!!! Kid! I’m dyin’ here, KID!”

And keep reading. In the 10^th apology, D’Apice finds a way to start making it up to Tig.

You’ll see. Though I feel she should also let Tig lick the baby.

Friend of SorryWatch Joe Hobaica, our curator of cake content, received this dandy surprise birthday treat from his lovely wife Mattie. It was not chocolate.

Mr. Hobaica acknowledges that in all probability Scout was not sorry.

I volunteer at a wildlife rescue center, one which specializes in aquatic birds. Sometimes volunteers and staff apologize to the birds.

What’s that you have in your hand? Oh, a camera? Are you sure? It can’t take temperatures, can it?

A Red-throated Loon is brought in and has an intake exam, in which we try to figure out what is wrong with the bird. What made this wild creature so ill or hurt that it fell into human hands? What are its problems? Are they things we can fix?

We handle it, pull its legs out and study its feet, extend its wings and fold them up again, stare into its desperate face with our huge monster faces. We draw blood from one foot. We take its temperature, and it flinches as the thermometer goes into its cloaca. “I know. I’m sorry,” murmurs the person inserting the thermometer.

We’ll learn more about his condition when we get the results from centrifuging his blood. We can already tell the bird is skinny and cold. His temperature, which would be a fever for a human, is low for a bird. We keep an eye on his temperature, and end up moving him into a warm intensive care room.

Adult Red-throated Loon, suspicious of photographer. Chicks in background show a fish what a loon can do when it’s not being pestered.

These are wild birds, and our practice is not to talk to them, and to minimize talking around them. We work quietly. But occasionally apologies slip out.

A lot of Western Grebes have been brought in lately. An indignant grebe has just been examined, and is being returned to a big pool where he can swim around with other grebes. He’s wrapped in a towel. Right before we put him back in the pool, we’ll give him some medicine, and a feeding through a tube, because he’s still too thin, and doesn’t really have the hang of eating dead fish out of the basket on the side of the pool. He doesn’t want the tube down his throat, and we don’t blame him. He struggles. “Calm down,” the other volunteer tells him. As he jerks his head, she says quietly, “I don’t like it either. I apologize.”

You don’t put any tubes down my throat and I won’t put any beaks in your eye. Deal?

Some of the people who work here have pet birds at home. Those birds understand human tones of voice. Not these wild ones. Soothing voices don’t soothe these guys. In their natural lives, they’re never around terrestrial mammals. They don’t have much intuition about our noises.

A rude gesture? I don’t know why you would assume that.

So why do we apologize to them? It’s not to help them. They don’t understand the words, or the tone.

We say we’re sorry, and we go right on doing it. We’re sorry in the sense that we don’t want to hurt and frighten them. We regret the necessity, but we do think it’s necessary. Taking the loon’s temperature gives us information that’s likely to save its life. Tube-feeding the grebe will keep it alive until it’s well enough to eat on its own. They’ll both go free when they’re healthy enough to survive.

The little sorries just slip out. Maybe we’re apologizing for our own sakes, to stay aware of where we are on the long slick slope of our concern for them. On one end of the slope we would take over their lives, make them into pets or livestock or exhibits. Unwild. On the other end we’d treat wild animals as wholly other, wholly responsible for their own welfare – we’d let them die, or at best, “put them out of their misery.”

One reason we don’t is that wild creatures no longer live in a world that humans haven’t affected drastically. We’ve changed their habitats: we’ve shrunk, depleted, invaded, and tainted those places. Humans have taken away some of the resources wild animals use to support themselves. This wildlife rescue center came to be, and specializes in aquatic birds, because of oil spills.

So we’ve placed ourselves somewhere in the middle, neither disclaiming responsibility nor trying to manage them like unruly pets. We work at not going too far toward either extreme. Maybe saying sorry helps us keep that balance.

The loon told me about you. Sicko.

Here’s a Red-necked Grebe, with wounds on its feet. For these birds, foot injuries are dangerous. Like bedsores, they can rapidly turn ugly, grow, spread infection through the body’s system, and kill. The birds need to have decent feet before we let them go.

At night, in winter storms, some birds try to land on rain-slick surfaces that look like water to them – roads, roofs, or pavement. They may break bones or tear up their feet. Maybe that happened to this grebe. Its feet are starting to heal, and to help the process along we have to debride the wounds. That means someone has to take (sterilized) retractors and pick dead tissue out of the site. Sometimes it hurts the bird.

The small grebe twitches, tries to jerk its foot away. Softly, the caregiver says, “I know. Sorry, buddy.”

They love their Halloween costumes so much I didn’t have the heart to make them change. They’re warrior ninja grebes and I have to warn you: I have NO CONTROL over them.

Note: This post is the first ever to be cross-posted on SorryWatch and The Nature of the Beast.

Billy Browne felt horrid about having to put painful drops into his cat Rufus’s ears. Rufus was not crazy about the situation either. He responded by running away from Billy. After the ear infection cleared up and the course of medicine was over, Billy apologized to Rufus by building him a cardboard box palace.

We have ZERO CRITICISM of this apology.

Thanks to Jezebel for the heads-up. Oh, and Rufus has a Facebook fan page.