Saving Victoria’s pets

We all know community foster care and rescue groups make a vital contribution to animal welfare across the country. Thousands of pets every year owe their lives to volunteer pet-lovers who give up their time to save the lives of needy animals. Rescue and foster groups involve the whole community to bring about life saving outcomes for pets, caring for them as if they were their own in healing family environments. Community rescue and foster groups are the life blood of the animal sheltering process.

Victoria however, has legislation which is hindering animal rescue and foster groups from operating. This week the internet has been awash with outrage that Victoria’s Department of Primary Industries (DPI) sent an notice to pounds across the state, advising them that to release pets to community rescue groups was in breach of the ‘Code of Practice for the management of dogs and cats in shelters’. The problem they claim, is that anyone taking pets from pounds should be registered as a domestic animal business (including individual foster carers) and that would mean complying with several group housing standards designed for shelters and pounds;

Dog Rescue Association of Victoria president Trisha Taylor said volunteers take unwanted dogs and cats into their own homes and spend time and money rehabilitating them so they can be rehomed. They did not want to have to turn their homes into animal shelters and report to the bureau.

”The rules for shelters are onerous and intended for multiple dog situations,” Ms Taylor said. ”This is no different than you taking an extra dog into your home and having to declare yourself an animal shelter, with the bureau coming to check you meet the code’s standards.”

She said volunteers did not put the rescued cats or dogs in cages, but treated them as pets until they were adopted out.

She said the bureau wanted to either gain control over rescue groups or shut them down – a move that would force up the kill rate of abandoned animals.
The Age

The situation has always been difficult for community rescue and foster groups in Victoria and this is why it hasn’t really thrived as it has in other states. The code of practice that they are referencing, has been in existence for years and if you were to interpret it in its most strict sense, rescue and foster would have always been illegal in Victoria. Some pounds have been interpreting the laws in a relaxed fashion to ‘get pets out the door’. Others have chosen not to work with rescue and use the laws as an excuse to kill animals. Depended entirely on who was in charge.

At most Victorian pounds, more animals are killed than are rehomed. Each and every day, thousands of dogs and cats are shot with firearms or given fatal overdoses of anesthetic, and their bodies discarded. All the while rescue groups stand by with safe foster homes at the ready, but are refused access to these animals. Often it is because pounds are afraid that by letting rescue groups in, they will be no longer able to hide poor performance, inhumane conditions or simply because ‘working with rescue is too much trouble’.

The groups in Victoria are doing an excellent job driving an ongoing effort to get recognition for community rescue. Taking advantage of the momentum of adoption and No Kill initiatives here and overseas, there is no doubt there is enormous community support for the awesome work that they do. The result is a clash between legislation from the nineties and the new belief system of the community about the valuable role of rescue, which is, almost unappreciatedly, only a few years old.

Politicians are promising to review the code of practice to make provision for rescue groups should they be elected. But they are doing so with a double-speak of ‘not wanting to have an unregulated rescue industry’. Even with evidence that the rescue industry is thriving in other states and that the animal outcomes are excellent, they still don’t trust the public to know how to care for pets. However, despite these unneccesary hurdles, this could be the very opportunity Victorian rescue groups have been waiting for.

If the behaviour of rescue groups in Victoria is outlined in a new Code of Practice, so should the rights of those same rescue groups be.

Community rescue and foster groups should be supported through proactive efforts to remove artibitrary rules that make it more difficult for them to operate. But if rescue groups do have to apply for a pre-determined financial status, provide certain reporting criteria and offer particular treatments and services to pets, in order to be an ‘authorised’ rescue group – pounds and shelters across the state should no longer be able to block or restrict access to death row pets. All groups should be granted a legal right to take any pet that a pound is unable to save. No pound should be able to choose to kill a pet if a rescue group is willing to take it, rehabilitate it and find it a new family.

In the case of somewhere like the Lost Dogs Home, who last year adopted 3,101 dogs, but killed 3,242 – each one these dogs should have been made available for further treatment by a rescue group. A pound management’s descretion to pick and choose whether they will work with rescue groups, when groups are willing to save and treat animals with money from their own pockets must be removed in the new legislation. Pounds must work with rescue groups and this must be made law if pets are to survive the shelter system.

If Victoria insist on standardising rescue and continuing down the restrictive path that has cost so many lives in the past, we must use it as an opportunity to gain recognition for the valuable role we play in the community.

The rights of rescue groups to save lives must be enshrined in law.