November 30, 2008Comments are closed.attitude, shelter procedure
Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additional existence.
Life, in short, just wants to be.”
Bill Bryson
As rescuers, working to save the lives of pets, you would expect that we’d be driving the charge to overhaul the animal sheltering process should it be failing and causing unnecessary death.
However, rather than find it abhorrent that we’re are damaging the very pets we purport to care for, it seems we’ve become apologists; excusing killing and poor performance with the defeatist rhetoric that not only is a certain level of killing acceptable, but that killing should be considered a viable alternative to the ‘trauma’ of being impounded.
For dogs who come into pounds what being in a pound does to them, mentally, is much crueler than euthanasia. Some dogs just do not deal well with impoundment and become either difficult or impossible to rehome due to the behaviours they exhibit when people visit the pound looking for a dog. For those dogs being PTS on day 1 would be preferable – sad but true.
Rescuer
I work every day with animals that sit in concrete runs waiting to die, they are scared, defensive, no doubt confused, some of them get rehomed, one would hope to a better place, but we know that is not always the case. Most die, but they die after sitting in those cage scared. A quick painless death before that, is preferable.
Rescuer
Rather than demand an environment that cares for the animals unlucky enough to find themselves impounded; rather than implore that we operate in ways that make an animals’ stay as least behaviourally challenging as possible; rather than insist on policies that increase a pets chance of adoption, and pressing to get pets off site via foster carers and rescue… we simply proclaim that quick death is preferable to being given a chance at life.
My pound is now at the all surrenders are PTS on surrender stage. We can cry, beat our breasts and stamp our feet and say it is unfair, but there is no where for these animals to go, a very lucky few will be pulled out and saved. I know for a fact that many dogs that are pulled from the pound go to homes that are less than desirable, is that good just because they are alive, I don’t think so.
Rescuer
This is the language of certain failure. When animals are coming out worse than when they went in; when the way they’re treated causes them to lose their chance to become a pet again; when the way they’re presented to the public causes the adopter to reconsider rescue because the dog has lost it’s marbles; then we’ve failed in our duty of care. And failure is not something we should be proud to defend.
When we believe that a pet is better off dead, than with us;
The animal has no idea whats going on. Its better to be PTS at the vets than dumped in a shelter where it spends 8 days in a tiny pen and is then PTS anyway.
Rescuer
Then we’ve absolutely failed. And we must recognise it as failure if we’re ever to move towards success.
Whenever a shelter kills a homeless animal entrusted to its care, it has profoundly failed. And animal shelters fail, as a general rule, fifty to eighty percent of the time. Put another way, animal sheltering is an industry whose leadership mostly fails. Unlike any other industry, however, these directors still retain their positions, are pillars of their communities, and are tapped as ‘experts’ by the large national groups. That credibility, and esteem, has been seriously threatened by the No Kill movement. In other words animal control directors, fearful of being held accountable for failure, are putting their own interests ahead of the lives of the animals.
An animal should never, ever be better off dead than in our care. And when it is, then we’re doing something completely and indefensibly wrong.
