April 12, 2010Comments are closed.attitude, customer service, resistance
There’s lots of talk lately of licencing schemes for dog owners, to counter high numbers of ‘irresponsible owners’. The Lost Dogs Home recently introduced its own pilot pet ownership licencing scheme, while the RSPCA have been working to bring in ‘responsible dog ownership’ legislation in an effort to reduce the number of dogs abused and abandoned. And each and every week articles, like this one from WA, are published in local papers around the country:
Dog owners are being urged to consider the consequences of abandoning their pets after new figures revealed about 1000 dogs a year were impounded in Stirling alone.
RSPCA spokesman Richard Barry said that the high rate of stray and abandoned dogs was disappointing.
“It’s of great concern to us that some dogs are simply abandoned for myriad reasons, ranging from a change in location through to a change in financial circumstances,” he said.
“One has to consider what their pet will go through once they have turned their back on it.”
He said a lack of desexing had a ‘tremendous influence’ on the high number of animals needing a home.
Stirling community development director Trevor Holland urged people to be committed to pet ownership before taking on the responsibility of owning a dog.
“Owning and caring for a pet comes with responsibilities, and these are for the duration of their lives, not just the holidays.”
And it sounds fair enough. The pounds are full and dogs are being euthanased so it’s a natural progression to start thinking that the public must be terrible and that they’re abandoning pets at enormous rates.
The article went on to present the following statistics:
2007
Total number of dogs impounded – 976
Reclaimed by owners – 596
Rehomed – 213
Killed – 1672008
Total number of dogs impounded – 1015
Reclaimed by owners – 647
Rehomed – 190
Killed – 1782009 (to October)
Total number of dogs impounded – 744
Reclaimed by owners – 500
Rehomed – 142
Killed – 102
Now, the City of Stirling has 84,000 people, and 17,000 registered dogs. They get, according to these statistics, around 1,000 dogs impounded each year. That’s about 5% of the total dog population.
So 95% of owned dogs live in their homes, without needing to go to the shelter.
That’s not terrible – that’s freaking fantastic!! And is it possible to improve on this? Probably not much.
In the shire each year around 600 dogs are collected by the owners (lost dogs) and of the 400 left, about 200 are rehomed and about 200 are killed.
Now just think about that for a second. They kill 200, save 200. They kill one for every one they save. That’s a 50% fail rate!
If I ran a business that made cakes and I failed to sell every second one; I’d go out of business.
If I was a teacher and every second child I taught couldn’t read; I’d (hopefully) get the sack.
If I was a fireman and every second fire burnt the building to the ground; my manager would be examining whether we had enough training, enough skills or whether other fire stations were doing any better.
You get the idea. Meanwhile pounds fail one in every two times, throw their hands up in the air and go ‘our public sucks – whattaya gonna do?’
And not much changes.
Well, lets look at it. If a dog lives an average 10 years, and assuming most people replace a dog within a few months of it passing:
Stirling’s population 17,000 dogs with 10% dying each year means there are approximately 1,700 new homes becoming available each and every year.
Stirling have just 400 dogs each year to rehome, there’s more than 4 times more homes available, than dogs they need to place. Not counting new homes or moving outside of their shire.
So they only need to convince one in every four people actively looking for a new dog, to adopt. Or another way, they need to complete just two adoptions a day. And it doesn’t need to be just adoptions; it can be handing them over to rescue, or networking with other Shires to ‘swap’ animals, or just handing them over the local pet shop. Anything but killing them.
These guys are open for 3.5hrs weekdays, while potential adopters are at work (2.00pm – 5.30pm), and they’re open for 1hr on weekends. So, they offer working families, exactly 2 hrs per week to adopt.
Imagine if a pet shop was open these hours. And located in an industrial area. Would we be shocked if it didn’t have any customers? Not very.
There is an awful lot of good to comment on about Stirling Council. They work with local rescue groups, have a volunteer program and they put their lost dogs on the web. And they made their annual figures available. But they’re still trapped in that blame culture which looks to punish the community for the number of pets killed in the shelter, rather than examining whether it needs to happen at all.
The scary thing is, if you do this with nearly any shire pound in Australia, you’ll find a similar story. They’ll say ‘we’re swamped; there’s so many irresponsible people in our area’ but then when you look at their intakes, they’re some tiny, insignificant number of the overall dog population. And the number of pets they do manage to save is tragically small.
While we’re often keen to get on board legislative solutions that target the public, targeting the community, who is overwhelmingly responsible and compliant, is both insulting and futile. Meanwhile, even in the face of incredibly high kill rates, we’re reluctant to cast a similar critical approach to the operating procedures of pounds in this country.
If we ever want to see a reduction in shelter pet killing, we must start calling these councils on their lack of performance; and they need to stop blaming pet owners for the killing and start taking those steps necessary to stop it.
