Reclaiming our role as life savers

Nathan Winograd’s latest blog post examines the problems created when animal rescue groups use their private, charitable dollars to perform animal control services for local councils. It also includes an excellent background on why this ‘merging’ of rescues and pounds occurred and how it has lead to high kill pounds running under the banner of  ‘homes’ or ‘sanctuaries’ or other misleading titles;

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Humane societies and SPCAs are so synonymous in people’s minds with animal control shelters, it is often hard for the public to separate the two functions. But animal control—protecting people from the perceived public health and safety threats caused by animals—is not why SPCAs were founded. That mandate ultimately belongs to government, not a private, not-for-profit.

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Rescue groups in Australia who use donations to run kill pounds, do so because they choose to. It’s worth noting that these organisations are under no obligation to take in more pets than they can rehome, as the responsibility for impoundment lay with their local council. Also, in many cases by taking over these pound contracts these organisations were granted exclusive rights to all impounded animals, effectively shutting out other private rescue and breed rescue groups (or working with them in a limited capacity ‘at their discretion’) leading to more animals being killed for space.

While Nathan isn’t suggesting that animal welfare organisations abandon pound programs overnight (often this would lead to an increase in neglect and killing) he does suggest that the aim of modern animal rescues should be moving towards lifesaving and away from law enforcement.

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After a century of having humane societies perform the pound work for their municipalities, we live in a nation where the organizations founded to save animals are, in fact, the ones killing them. We live in a nation where the very institutions who should be attacking that paradigm are instead defending it. We live in a nation of anti-animal laws which are being enforced by the very institutions who should be legally challenging them. And we live in a nation where the SPCAs and humane societies which should be unequivocal advocates for lifesaving are instead fighting those who are.

So we must always be pragmatic in our strategy, assessing the political landscape of each community independently to determine a course of action which will result in the greatest lifesaving in the shortest amount of time or which will preserve the achievement of such. But we must also always keep in mind what should be the ultimate goal of the No Kill movement—building the necessary paradigm to allow for the redirecting of our nation’s private SPCAs and humane societies away from animal control and back to the philosophy which motivated the movement’s founders: a commitment to furthering the welfare and rights of animals, fighting animal cruelty, and saving their lives.

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So how does splitting the roles of  ‘animal control’ and ‘animal rescue’ help the pets and the community? Well, by handing responsibility of animal impoundment and registration back to local councils, we allows animal rescue organisations the freedom to specialise in the services they perform best; high volume adoption, feral cat colony management, low-cost desexing programs and lifetime care for pets.

Presently, resources that should be being used to promote rescue pet adoption are being used for tasks that aren’t about saving lives, but punishing the community. The sooner we hand those responsibilities back to our government and start using our resources for what people donated them for, the sooner we can move towards a future where we’re adopting, not killing, homeless pets.