Two articles on shelter killing take very different approaches. Which team sounds like it’s delivering a message of hope and leaves you feeling inspired and motivated to help your community?:
According to the No Kill Equation, “Adoptions are vital to an agency’s lifesaving mission. The quantity and quality of shelter adoptions is in shelter management’s hands, making lifesaving a direct function of shelter policies and practice. In fact, studies show people get their animals from shelters only 20% of the time. If shelters better promoted their animals and had adoption programs responsive to the needs of the community, including public access hours for working people, offsite adoptions, adoption incentives, and effective marketing, they could increase the number of homes available and replace killing with adoptions. Contrary to conventional wisdom, shelters can adopt their way out of killing.” Let’s repeat that last sentence because it represents a phenomenal discovery, but it is also the opposite of everything that we have been taught. “Shelters can adopt their way out of killing.”
All the adoption promotions in the world will never solve the problem, said Virginia Keller, president of the Spay Neuter Action Coalition of Georgia.
“These people just don’t get it,” she said. “There will never be enough homes for all the animals that are produced at today’s rate. Never. The answer to this problem is strictly spay and neuter.”
[…]
“They think animal control is an adoption center,” Keller said. “No way. I don’t know how you get this idea across to people, unless they want to come and watch it happen.”
If you are killing thousands of healthy/treatable shelter pets a year and your animal control is “no way” an adoption center – umm, maybe it should be.
Like Nathan Winograd says, regardless of all of the excuses, and semantics, the reason why cats and dogs are killed by the millions every year is because shelters, pounds, animal control etc kill them.
Pure. Simple. To the point.
To become No Kill, shelters, pounds, etc must stop killing animals.
Lame excuses wont get them any closer to doing so, nor will it excuse their murderous acts. Only by caring for, loving and respecting the life of every individual soul, and by making killing healthy cats and dogs NOT AN OPTION, will the killing end.
Of course the common sense, compassionate answer is to:
1. Become No Kill (Without this, we will fail)
2. Implement TNR Programs (Keep cats out of shelters and the shelters cant murder them.)
3. Implement Spay/Neuter Programs (limit the number of new cats and dogs born which only adds to the problem)
4. Implement Foster Home Programs (which can allow cats and dogs a place to stay and take away the shelters mythical excuse of killing because “there are not enough cages for them all”
5. Extending shelter hours (9-5 are ridiculous hours…most would be adopters are working..)
6. Get tough with breeders (animal pimps) so that pets in shelters dont die because someone saw an ad in the paper from a breeder).
Step # 1 is the essential one. In order to stop cats and dogs from being killed, we must stop killing cats and dogs.
We must let our government officials, shelter officials, pounds, animal control, etc know that we have zero tolerance for killing healthy cats and dogs.
The idea is not to be mediocre and “improve the number of animals saved”. The idea is to stop ANY healthy animal from being killed. Mediocre officials cant seem to grasp this.
Oh and let your officials know about this:
http://www.guerrillaeconomics.biz/communitycats/
These photo and videos break my heart into a million pieces. They torture my soul. I have 5 dogs of my own. I’m not rich by any means, but every one single one is vetted AND, and I do mean AND, insured, for illness or injury/surgery so that they don’t need put down for something fixable.
If I can do that, so can anyone else. I was on unemployment for awhile, and I was STILL able to accomplish this.
The key to this is learning to live on one ONE income, while having extra money with two. And my husband only has a high school education.
I also have 3 kids, 2 cat, and a granddaughter. AND I’m able to put money into savings every month.
There are no excuses. Anyone can do what we are doing. If people would stop putting their priorities on THINGS and start putting their priorities towards family, and include animals as their family.
Its called LIVING WITHIN YOUR MEANS, and and making your “means” LESS. It means DOWNSIZING to start with, so that when the economy fails, you don’t lose your house or the things you have or the PETS you have and should be comitted to throughout their entire lives, as if they are part of the family, and not “just a” dog or cat or whatever animal you have. Its really NOT that hard.
We live VERY comfortably. VERY. We already had a nice home, and a nice yard. But we made a lot of changes to cut down on utility bills, and take advantage of the sun, and rainwater. We are willing to do a little extra work to save money, and its really not that much extra work when the savings are considerable.
Anyone can do what we did, and are still doing. And I’d be happy to tell anyone what those thing are if it means they make a committment to a few animals that need homes.