A tribute to the emotive photography of Jacquie Pollitt
Dr Michael O’Donoghue, founder of the pet loss support organisation People & Pets, pays tribute to the animal photography of Jacquie Pollitt.
When I was a student, I travelled far from home to the School of Veterinary Medicine at UC Davis in Northern California. It was there, working with the researcher and pet loss expert, Dr Bonnie Mader, that I realised the depth of pain people experience after the loss of a pet.
Very much ahead of the times, UC Davis offered a support hotline and counselling service for pet owners struggling with the emotional toll of losing a pet. Nothing like this existed back home – I pledged to myself then and there to one day create a similar service in Australia.
But life, as it tends to do, postponed these well-laid plans. I became busy working as a full-time veterinarian and raising a family. So it wasn’t until 2008 when I met up with an old family friend that I picked up the threads of this potential service again.
That friend, Penny Carroll, told me on that fateful day that she wanted to become a pet loss counsellor. I took this as an opportunity not only to help support Penny, but also to dip my toes into the pet loss services I had pledged to create back in my student days.
Our first project was to create a range of pet sympathy cards with Penny’s phone number on the back to encourage grieving pet owners to reach out for support. We realised from the start that in order for the venture to be successful we would need to have some inspirational animal photography for the front of the cards.
It just so happened that I was working with veterinary nurse Jacquie Pollit at Forest Lake Vets at the time, and one day she showed me a bunch of recent pictures she had taken of her pets. They were so emotive in the way that they captured the personality of Jacquie’s pets and the genuine love she felt for them. It was exactly what we needed, and Jacquie was more than happy to contribute her photography.
So we printed up a batch of cards and approached Provet to distribute them. They were very supportive of the idea and that was that – we were off!
Jacquie took the pictures for our cards ‘Dog at the Lake’, ‘Irish Setter’, ‘Tortoiseshell cat’, ‘The Sleeping Cat’ and ‘Cat at the Window’. All loving tributes to her own pets. These cards have been at the heart of our service from the very beginning, providing solace to thousands of pet owners across Australia.
Jacquie wrote to me the other day: “How lovely it was to receive a message from a dear friend last night whose gorgeous dog recently passed. They received a card from their vet and on the cover of the card was a photo I took quite a while ago now when Toby was just a young dog. Even after your own passing Toby, you still give comfort to many and through that comfort you live on much further than the memories of you our family will always hold dear. Indeed, your reach is much further than I could have ever imagined.”
I am incredibly grateful for Jacquie’s enthusiasm, her photography and her pets – they have all played an integral part in creating the pet loss support service I first pledged to create all those years ago.