The third door

If you work in rescue it’s likely that you own a pet that, should something unfortunate happen to you, wouldn’t pass the very same tests you put potential adoptees through. Their temperaments mean they’re not safe to be given to the public – or they have health issues that require more care than most people would be willing to commit to.


I have Ajax; my “problem child”, but despite his issues with the world,  he’s a good dog, loving, and I wouldn’t be without him for anything.


So why then, when we hear about animal sanctuaries that hold disabled or unrehomable animals, do we automatically jump to the conclusion that something is desperately wrong? That these animals must be so “messed up” that they should be put to death for their own benefit?


That when considering the options for these pets, we assume unrehomable automatically means “unable to live any life at all”?

No one wants hopelessly ill or injured dogs and cats kept alive while irremediably suffering, because that is cruel. No one wants truly vicious dogs adopted into the community, because that is dangerous. And while over 90 percent of dogs and cats entering shelters are neither hopelessly suffering nor vicious, we shouldn’t be satisfied with killing the remainder.
Nathan Winograd

So what to do with the unrehomable pet – introducing the third door as detailed by Nathan Winograd in his blog today. It’s the door or option between rehoming and euthanasia – the sanctuary.


Now often you hear that it’s unethical to spend hundreds or thousands one pet, when that money could be used to save many other more rehomable pets, or desexing programs or something more “worthy”. But how much would you spend on your own un-rehomable furchild? Or any of your pets? This argument is flawed because money is not a finite thing. Money spent on one, does not directly take from another; money spent in my household doesn’t take from yours. The 4 billion a year spent on pet care in Australia each year, is in no way unethical because it’s not being spent on “saving” pets – if it’s your money, or resource then it’s up to your personal descretion how you use it. This is true for the people who choose to donate to support these sancturaries and the decisions made by those who run them.


As long as we’re are aware of, and can meet the behavioural and emotional needs of individual animals, then we flatter ourselves to think these pets can’t be happy living in anything but a house with a nuclear family (the dogs in my Vanuatu post would beg to differ). We have to start getting past our predujice that a life spent in a sanctuary is no life at all.