A local TV news crew visited the Miami-Dade Animal Services shelter last month to do a report on increased shelter intakes and overcrowding:
From the front of the building where people are handing over their pets, to the back gates where strays are being dragged in, the Miami-Dade Animal Shelter is busting at the seams.
Strays are being dragged in – Where in the world did that verbiage come from?
Since intakes are up and the shelter is overcrowded, the report reviews some numbers:
Last year 37,000 [pets] came into the shelter. Despite record adoptions, just 14,000 left alive.
That’s a 62% kill rate “despite record adoptions“.
On a typical day the shelter adopts out 24 animals. That pales in comparison to the 91 on average that are euthanized seven days a week.
91 pets killed every day of the week. Figuring an 8 hour day, that’s over 11 pets killed every hour of the workday. Assuming the shelter might take some holidays off from killing every year, I calculated 91 pets killed per day times 7 days per week equals 637 pets killed per week, times 51 weeks per year equals 32, 487 pets killed per year.
While the numbers are staggering, I was honestly not prepared for the next part of the report:
Yeah I guess no one will adopt him NOW but golly, doncha think having a frelling TV news crew at the shelter would have been a super opportunity to put a spit-shine on this li’l monkey and a bandanna around his neck and mention that he’s looking for a new best friend? He probably would have been adopted by the end of the day and perhaps even some other dogs could have benefited from the overflow. But instead of doing something to help him get adopted while the news crew was there, the shelter chose to kill him.
And in case you didn’t get the point, the shelter operations manager drives it into the dirt:
[Xiomara] Mordcovich said, “People need to realize what happens here, and they need to understand that this is the consequence of what happens in the community out there. This is what we all do to our best friend.”
WE ALL? – No ma’am. This is not what we all do to our best friend. Killing pets and blaming the public is what you do. WE ALL are a humane society and we don’t want pets killed because they’re homeless. We want them sheltered until new homes can be secured. That’s why it’s called an animal shelter. Look it up.
Added: Video of the news report available at the above link and on John Sibley’s blog as well.