Tonight I, like many of you, have someone special sharing my Christmas Eve. I have a sweet and beautiful pet, whom a shelter threatened to kill. Surrey’s “crime” was being pregnant and about to give birth. The day the volunteers at the Tipton Co shelter sent out the plea about Surrey, there were two other bitches there, just as pregnant as she was. After I e-mailed my offer to take her, I was directed to the volunteers’ page on Facebook. I scrolled through some of the posts and saw one of the other pregnant bitches. She was a black dog and so didn’t photograph very well inside the shelter. She looked possibly like a Pitbull mix and it was obvious, even in poor lighting, that she was very pregnant. There was an update on her the morning after Surrey had been sprung. The black mama dog, with her puppies wiggling in her belly, had been killed by the shelter. I closed the page. I never knew what happened to the other bitch in whelp.
Tonight, as Surrey lays in her bed underneath the Christmas tree, I am thinking about how lucky I am to have her here. I am thinking too about the black mama dog at Tipton Co, and all her unborn pups, who were thrown in the dumpster, their remains now rotting in the landfill. That girl deserved to be in a dog bed under someone’s Christmas tree too. Her puppies deserved a chance to be born and to be fawned over by squealing children. Every pet in the Tipton Co shelter, like every pet in every animal shelter in this county, deserves to live.
It is morally and ethically wrong for anyone to kill a healthy/treatable pet. There is no justification. None.
Surrey is my pet. Every animal in a shelter tonight in this country is my pet too. I love them. It’s not possible for me to have them all physically sleeping under my Christmas tree tonight but they are there in spirit. They are in my heart and in my head. Not a day or night goes by that I am not thinking about them – hoping for them. Until there is not a single pet under threat of death at the hands of a so-called shelter, I will keep advocating for no kill.
We can not change every shelter worker’s morals or ethics, but we can work to get the law on the side of pets in need. If we could get CAPA passed in every state in this country, needless shelter pet killing would not only be morally and ethically wrong – it would be legally wrong. If it seems sometimes like I’m nagging people to take political action, this is why. Because within this legal action lies my hope. It won’t erase every problem within our nation’s broken shelter system but it’s a big, fat foot in the door. Right now, they are slamming that door in our faces while they do their killing. I want to jam a foot in the door of every kill room in every shelter in every state. I want to hear our voices yelling through the crack, “You have no right – stop!”
I don’t say all this just because it’s Christmas or just because I have a pair of soft brown Beagle eyes gazing at me sleepily. I say it because this is the truth I know. Every pet in a kill shelter tonight is Surrey. And every pet in a kill shelter tonight is the black mama dog with no name. There is no difference. But there ought to be. There ought to be a law. Because killing a defenseless pet who wants nothing more than to be loved should be a crime. If we can’t appeal to the better angels of our nature to get the killing to stop, we’ll have to put the law on the side of shelter pets. Are you prepared to jam your foot in a door to end the killing?
hummm… Jam your foot in the door … link didn’t work for me. Anyone else ?
TY for the heads up Dot. Link fixed.
Merry Christmas!!
I couldn’t jam my foot in the door:
The page you trying to reach does not exist, or has been moved. Please use the menus or the search box to find what you are looking for.
Merry Christmas Vicki! If you hit ‘refresh” on your browser, the corrected link should appear. It is:
http://www.nokilladvocacycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/politadvocacy.pdf
I totally agree with your opinion. It seems that the people in this wonderful country we live in turn their heads away from this issue and does not care to confront it. I think a lot of people need to realize that all animals (not just domestic) need protection from unnecessary killing or cruelness. It is so frustrating to hear about all the bad things going on to animals who have no voice, but at least there are some special people –like you– speaking out for the animals. So, thank you and hope you are having a Merry Chrismas.
Sometimes it looks like we take leaps backwards, when some of us are trying to more forward…
HELP stop the shooting of stray #dogs in North Carolina! – sign/share http://ow.ly/89RKz #NorthCarolina
Signed and shared…
Maybe 2012 can be a year that celebrates compassion. I heartily agree with your position that legislative action by all of us is critical, and a moral imperative. There should be no more excuses for killing these treatable and ultimately adoptable pets.
2012 will be an interesting year. So many issues have come to a head lately – people are beginning to ‘get it’. We have been lied to about ‘pet overpopulation’. We have been lied to about so many things regarding animal welfare, and many people are simply fed up. I see a very tiny light at the end of the tunnel. Hope for the New Year.
It is a given that we need to pay closer attention to political issues, but something must be done to truly educate the media – where I see so many dreadful lies being spread. One of my local ‘humane societies’ got the AP to report about how the bad economy is causing overcrowding and unnecessary euthanizations at shelters in my state. Yet this same ‘humane society’ will not take in any of these economic refugees. Instead, they cherry pick adoptable (younger, smaller, pure-bred, more ‘attractive’) animals from our urban animal control agency to sell at their state-of-the-art shelter/pet store, and compete against the same AC group for families to adopt THEIR pets instead of taking in the truly needy animals. The media makes this faux HS appear to be ‘no kill’, ignoring the fact that the AC agency virtually does the killing for them. And even worse, this faux HS IMPORTS hundreds and hundreds of cute puppies from southern states (can you say ‘puppy mill outlet’?) to sell for $350-$500 each, because AC can’t provide enough of what the public wants. And the MEDIA gives this group free advertising by celebrating these animals as ‘rescue’ puppies. Their volunteers repeat the mantra that they keep their adoption fees so high because people will care more for something they pay more money for. Bah. Humbug. The economy is bad, so let’s just make it harder and harder for more and more people to afford a family pet . . . makes no sense in my world.
It’s a tough job (telling the truth), but someone has to do it. You are doing a great job. Keep hope alive. Eventually enough people will understand what really works, and the multi-million-dollar anti-animal groups will be put in their place.