“The Lost Dogs’ Home has had quite a high number of dogs arrive at the shelter over the long weekend, especially after the storms yesterday! If you have lost your dog and think they may have been brought to The Lost Dogs’ Home, please come to the shelter and take a look, especially our North Melbourne facility.”
It should be a legal requirement that all pounds list photos of lost pets online – so all owners (even if they are several suburbs away, or are working business hours) have the opportunity to look for their pets. Any pound who isn’t doing this, is not doing everything they can to reunite pet and owner.
Online photos are not just for people who lost their pet say, yesterday. Pets go missing for extended periods. People hold onto them. They take a while to be collected and live ‘wild’ for a bit.
If you are taking in people’s animals – and are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so – the very least you can do is publish pets’ photos online, so owners who’ve returned to work, or who use public transport to get around, can continue their search into the weeks and months after their pet goes missing.
It is completely unreasonable to expect people to show up every day at the pound to look in the cages. We know that pounds who use proactive programs return 60% – 80% of dogs home. If nearly all dogs have owners looking for them, why do we accept such low return to owner rates from our major animal organisations?
Killing owned pets, with families who would happily take them back is not ‘overpopulation’ – it is a major failure of the system that we pet lovers are funding to protect our pets.
Does your local pound list lost pets photos online, or do they just kill these likely owned and loved pets for convenience?
