09/17/2021
Detroit Animal Care and Control & Friends of Detroit Animal Care and Control
How do you justify KILLING animals for space as you turn rescues away due to your PETTY EGOS?
Kumpf, McCaskill, Eldred, McClanahan, Bigwood, and probably others need to step down and walk away. Dogs are needlessly dying and their blood is on YOUR conscience and your hands.
When pound staff kill animals, they violate the animals’ right to life. But is “shelter” killing also a human rights issue?
Yes, as there are also human victims.
When California was considering a bill to make it illegal for “shelters” to kill animals if rescue groups were willing to save them, legislators heard horror stories from traumatized rescuers being denied animals who were instead killed, even though they were ready, willing, and able to save them: http://bit.ly/2R4VoJu.
Here's one such testimonial: “I went to the shelter because I was told they had a mother cat and four kittens that they had scheduled to be killed even though they were healthy. When I arrived to pick up the cat and kittens, the shelter manager asked to see me. She told me that a member of our rescue group wrote a letter complaining about the shelter to the Board of Supervisors and that they didn’t appreciate it. She told me I could therefore only have one kitten. I begged her to let me take them all, but she said that I couldn’t. She told me to pick one and she was going to euthanize the rest, including the mother cat. I didn’t know what to do. And so I picked. My hand was shaking as I filled out the paper work. After I got the kitten, I went outside and sat in the car. Then I threw up all over myself”: https://youtu.be/UzKrVYbQ3UE.
My own dog, Oswald, came from a pound that had a “no rescue” policy, choosing to kill an additional 4,000 animals a year. Thankfully, he entered that pound after we successfully passed the California law and he was rescued on what otherwise would have been his last day of life. He is not only one of roughly 90,000 additional animals being saved throughout the state that pound staff would have otherwise killed, but he was rescued by one of countless volunteers whose right to do so is now protected by law: https://bit.ly/2Q7eqPo.
Day in and day out, animal rescuers and shelter volunteers show tremendous courage and compassion — visiting a place that is hard for animal lovers to go: their local shelter. And yet they go back, again and again. Unless those rights are protected, they must endure the hostile treatment. They endure the heartbreak of seeing the animals they care about destined for the needle. They endure having to jump through unnecessary and arbitrary hurdles set by shelter directors who are holding the animals they want to save hostage.
Indeed, a new study found that the higher the rates of killing at a pound, the greater the trauma to volunteers. If we want to protect the rights of people who volunteer at shelters, we need to reform the pounds. Not only does doing so protect animals, but it radically transforms the culture of a shelter, making it a safe, hospitable, even rewarding place to volunteer: https://bit.ly/3CVyxr1.
Take Valerie, a volunteer who fostered a litter of kittens for the Tompkins County, NY, shelter before I became their director in the early 2000s. She stopped volunteering after kittens she had fostered were killed, even though staff promised they would call if they had a “space crunch” and needed her to take them back into foster care. When she came to the shelter and some of them were no longer there, she “checked the logbook to see when they were adopted. Instead, I was stunned to learn that two of them had been killed. I never even received a telephone call or an email asking that I take them back. They had been perfectly healthy and loved and wanted, and they had a place to go if the shelter ran out of room. I felt sick. The room began spinning. I was in tears. I’ll never forget the looks of shock on the faces of the other volunteers. The staff didn’t budge. One other volunteer was concerned and tried to stop me from leaving, but I fled the building and somehow managed to bike the several miles home, even though I could barely see for crying”: https://youtu.be/UzKrVYbQ3UE.
That all changed when I took over as director and we stopped killing (and Valerie, who had quit, started fostering again), something that could have been done at any time. No one is “required” to kill animals. No one is forced to do so against their will. As Tompkins County proved then and hundreds of communities and the data nationally have since reaffirmed, shelter killing is a choice: https://youtu.be/z-CwFaUsuTg.
Of course, it is the animals who pay the ultimate price when the programs and services which make No Kill possible are not comprehensively implemented: https://youtu.be/JCTt5JppNA8, but they are not the only ones who suffer. Animal rescuers and shelter volunteers are already donating their time, their energy, their resources and their love to make our world a better place. They shouldn’t have to sacrifice their emotional well-being, too.
——————
Please join me on Substack: https://nathanwinograd.substack.com/.
