Tik, Tok—When Time Was Running Out

Their small bodies—one tan and bright-eyed, the other white and brown with adorable, freckled ears—were seen darting through suburban streets, their sides heaving as their panic was unmistakeable. Local social-media pages lit up with sightings as they fled together, clinging tightly to the only certainty they had left: each other.

Suburbia is no place for gentle beings like them. And the reason they were there at all lingered heavily between the sorrowful lines. Backyard slaughter remains an unspoken shadow in some neighbourhoods and Tik and Tok weren’t just running from people, but from what people had planned for them.

Council rangers were set to seize them for being “at large”, but Tik and Tok continued to slip through their grasp. Then a wildlife rescuer—trading native animal emergencies for farmed animal ones—called us. And we did not hesitate in accepting the baton of kindness that was passed to us—and we ran with it.

Tik and Tok didn’t know their luck had finally turned. How could they? Their short lives had taught them humans were something to fear with their raised voices, grabbing hands and chasing feet.

But slowly and softly, they’re learning a different truth.

No harsh words come their way now. No one runs at them. No one sees them as a commodity.

Today, they spend their time chatting through the fence with Richard the Lionheart and his mischievous band of goat kids. They cautiously sniff the hands of kindly human folk. And in the warm sanctuary sun, their fear gradually loosens its grip. As they stretch into the light, they feel its possibility—a life where kindness is finally the rule and not an impossible dream.

Loved and now free, Tik and Tok are safe. But they are the lucky ones.

For every Tik and Tok, countless others are still running and they are running out of time.

So for them, we offer this reminder: We limit our understanding when we cling too tightly to what we think we know. We diminish our humanity when we decide whose lives matter and whose do not. And we endanger our own world when we fail to extend kindness to theirs.

Tik and Tok have escaped the ticking clock, but the clock continues to count down.

It’s time—time to stop the clock on animal cruelty and indifference. Time to end the taking of their lives to serve our own. And it’s time to build the kinder world we so desperately need and they so rightly deserve.

Before it is too late.