The last year has seen more development in community-based pound programs than any year previous. When welfare advocates have been driving for this reform for in some cases literally decades, why has 2014 seen so much activity? What has changed?
The pain point is the exact moment that resisting a particular action becomes more ‘painful’ than simply starting to do that action.
Addicts might call it ‘hitting rock bottom’; the physical and emotional pain of an addiction becomes more painful, than the pain of treatment and recovery. It might be the pain of seeing the unflattering photo, which makes you overcome the pain of committing to a gym. Or the pain of the daily grind, which drives an individual into the pain of studying for their ‘dream’ job.
The desire to end pain can be a potent motivator.
In the case of our nations pounds, and council servicing shelters, the major pain was clear – working with rescue.
It’s true. The people who do animal rescue can be giant pains in the ass. They have very strong feelings about what classifies as humane treatment for pets. They tend to throw massive hissies when pets get sick and die in craptastic council facilities, or through poor handling and quarantine. They want pets desexed, which is a massive hassle involving vets and budgets. They headcount the pets – and that’s the worst! It’s really difficult to quietly cull pet numbers down, when rescuers keep photographing and naming the goddamn animals. And they tend to have massive, overwhelming hang-ups about pets being shot with firearms or killed unnecessarily with a poison overdose – annoying.
To date pain of working with rescue was the largest pain a pound management faced. This was an easy one to avoid – just don’t. Shut your doors. Refuse to answer their calls. Ignore them. Call them names and tell your management that they were simply unworkable. Sorted.
There is an idea in the animal welfare field, that killing pets causes those doing the killing almost immeasurable ‘pain’. This is simply false. Killing pets – even healthy, perfectly adoptable ones – is generally a low pain exercise. The animal management system has designed itself a kind of inbuilt emotional immune system to this pain. Killing is rebranded as a ‘kindness’. The pets are ‘unwanted’ or ‘unsaveable’. The pound is simply ‘doing the public’s dirty work’. And the reason the pound is having to kill at all is simply due to ‘public irresponsibility’ leading to ‘animal overpopulation’. The emotional pain of killing is diluted by a system which in every way excuses this killing as unavoidable. Even when practically no effort is made to actually avoid the practice of killing.
Killing the majority of pets has been the reality of pound procedure in Australia, for the last several decades. And apart from the occasional mouthy animal advocate (who can be simply explained away by unwanted, unsaveable, doing the public’s dirty work, ‘public irresponsibility’ and ‘animal overpopulation’), this has pretty much been totally accepted by the community, council management, and major charity pound providers. We have had a pound system which killed pets, rather than implemented the programs needed to stop it, because killing those pets was – contrary to popular belief – the least painful option.
Except now, there’s a new pain being felt – the angry community rally;
The Pound Reform Alliance Australia Rally (Victoria)
Save Our Shelter and Keep Our Pound Local action groups (Katoomba/Blue Mountains NSW)
The rally for the animals of Geelong Animal Welfare Society (GAWS) (Geelong, VIC)
Rally to save the lives of Charlie and Sharni (Frankston VIC)
Rally in support of the Animal Welfare League Queensland (Ipswich, QLD)
The community of Leeton rally for fair treatment of their community’s animals (Leeton, NSW)
Animal rescuers protest at Blacktown Council (Blacktown, NSW)
Animal welfare advocates protest outside Campbelltown Animal Care Facility (Campbelltown NSW)
Suddenly across the nation, pounds who kill are threatened by the potential pain of having a bunch of angry animal lovers with proverbial pitchforks, singing songs and rally cries outside council buildings, phoning council offices, talking to the media, and swamping official city facebook pages…
… as compared to the pain of working with rescue groups; those lovely people who seem to care a lot about pets and placing them responsibly, who will drop everything and collect pets at a moments notice, who will arrange vet work and save the council untold squillions of dollars treating ill and injured pets, who seem to like magic make high kill numbers into low kill numbers (which face it, keep the angry hoards happy)… and they’re starting to think – gosh rescue! We need to get ourselves a rescue group!
Working with rescue is less pain than an angry mob.
So this is a good thing, right? Yes! Of course it is. Pounds opening their doors to rescue, is absolutely a good thing. But there’s a catch (isn’t there always?)
Your average ranger earns between $60k – $90k a year. Your average shelter manager, between $70k – $150k a year. Rescues are self-funded charities staffed with unpaid volunteers. And yet in this new setup of let all unclaimed pets go to rescue, the new extra load of keeping pets alive is thrust unfairly onto these charities. Council simply allow these rescue to step in and ‘save’ the animals. However, the only danger those animals are actually facing is from the same staff who are being paid to care for them, standing by ready to regress to their original solution… a needle and a bottle of Lethabarb (or a shotgun).
There is a huge amount of push and shove taking place right now. Rescue groups accessing pets want pounds to continue to release animals and not return to the bad-old-days, where rescue was seen as the painful problem rather than the solution. Because of this, they are loathe to rock the boat, or demand reform.
The pet advocating public (the ones with the signs who scared the pounds into opening their doors) are kept in the dark. And with kill rates now at record low levels on paper, they have no reason to believe that there is still a problem at the pound.
Worse still – in a terrible twist – rescuers have become enablers for the poor performance of the pound. They beg advocates not to criticise and shut down any advocacy or reform, trying to keep pound staff ‘on-side’, believing pets leaving alive today is enough – even if no other more meaningful reform takes place.
The pound can still offer absolutely no other programs, simply pass off all of its responsibilities to local charities, and it’s in the clear. They can pat themselves on the back for their excellent ‘rehoming’ rates, as their problems have disappeared thanks to devoted rescuers saving animals. And yet nothing about their mentality, policies or procedures has changed at all.
There has been a massive inpouring of newly created rescue groups establishing themselves practically overnight in response to pounds starting to do more than simply act as a council disposal service for animals. These groups are innovative and dedicated, but they’re rapidly also realising a truth – the act of propping up a local council service using charity resources is largely unsustainable.
After the ‘pounds being unwilling to work with rescue’ pain point, and the ‘pounds working with rescue to appease the community’ pain point, comes what is probably the most important pain point of all; the ‘pounds being forced to help themselves’ pain point.
Councils must be forced by their local communities to enshrine, legislate and finance compassionate and proactive pound services. This will not happen easily. Just as the struggle to get pound doors to open to rescue took community outrage and reaction, so will it be neeed to see meaningful reform to the foundation of pound operations in this country.
