If I were to start a charity to help homeless people, take donations from the public and purport to be a leader in welfare; and my organisation was called, The Foundation for the Charismatic, Good Looking, Healthy Homeless I think I’d have some explaining to do.
Because everyone knows that it would be wrong to discriminate against someone who needed help just because they weren’t good looking. Everyone also knows that a lack of charisma may actually be a precursor to needing more help to get ahead in life, so to form a charity who excludes this group is missing those who may need the most assistance. And when people found out that rather than work to create programs to help those with health problems, that I advocated their immediate ‘euthanasia’, I would probably be howled down as completely unprincipled.
And yet for many in the animal welfare world, their charity model is based on this exact idea; The Foundation for the Easily Rehomed, Well Behaved, Healthy Homeless Pet.
However, unlike ‘people’ charity CEO’s, shelter managers have had the advantage; the little gem ‘overpopulation and human irresponsibility’. All the while the public believed there were ‘too many’ pets to find good homes; these organisations could help the happy, easily rehomed, well behaved, healthy pets – kill the rest – and claim their charity was doing ‘all it could’ to help animals. It was a sweet deal; animal charities got rich, the public didn’t ask questions and the animals… some got saved, others were deemed ‘better off dead’ and no one had to work very hard because if an animal didn’t get rehomed, they could just call it ‘unadoptable’ and kill it too.
In 2010 however, the wheels have fallen off the traditional ‘kill’ model. Shelters around the world have lead their community to No Kill, not with fancy new laws, licencing or confinement, but by treating and caring for all the pets who need help, regardless of how they look, how they behave, or how easy it is to find them a new home.
Shelters who offer ‘shelter’ to the most disadvantaged in our communities, just as a human charity would, and finding way to save and respect the lives of the animals they claim to protect;
Austin, Texas has its highest save rate in August ever, thanks to the firing of the ASPCA-backed director and the move toward a No Kill Equation-based system: almost 8 out of 10 animals were saved. The Nevada Humane Society is breaking its own adoption records by doing the same. A shelter director in Australia which was saving 93% of all dogs and saved all baby kittens this year in the Australian Capital Territory takes over the shelter system in Tasmania, immediately dropping the kill rate by 38%. And an open admission shelter in New Zealand is on track to finish the year with a stunning 99% rate of lifesaving.
This of course is starting to make shelters who built their whole empires on ‘save a few nice ones, kill the rest’ nervous. They don’t want to have to work to save lives or spend their enormous fortunes on silly things like ‘treatment’ or ‘rehabilitation’… so they’re looking for laws to help them out. They lobby for laws against pit bulls and pit bull crosses, ignoring evidence which shows breed bans fail to make the community safer, simply because its easier to kill a pit bull than find it a home. They lobbying for laws which meant all cats must be desexed and confined, so that free-roaming cats must be impounded and killed (for their ‘own good’ obviously) because its simpler than finding solutions for these community cats. Finally pets which are sick, have behaviour problems, are old or young, look to codes of practice to determine they are all unadoptable.
But the days of the The Foundation for the Easily Rehomed, Well Behaved, Healthy Homeless Pet are numbered. For groups to secure the support and donations animal lovers in the future, they must stand up and protect all animals, not just the easily rehomed, well behaved, healthy ones. That is going to mean innovation and lifesaving programs. It’s going to mean a change of leadership. With communities going No Kill worldwide, shelters who refuse to find solutions beyond killing are no longer going to receive their public’s blessing or support.
Mahatma Gandhi is often quoted by animal advocates for saying; “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated”.
Today the new truth is thus; “The greatness of our nation’s animal welfare organisations and their moral progress can be judged on how they treat the most vulnerable animals they care for”.
Modern sheltering is about solutions for all animals that need help; not picking and choosing those who do and don’t ‘deserve’ our protection. Sick and treatable pets, pit bulls and free-roaming cats are the last vilified group of victims to be offered compassion. There is no No Kill future unless groups find solutions beyond killing them for convenience.
