It’s award season. Don’t worry, if you just can’t make up your mind on which quote is most deserving, you can vote for more than one.
Your choices are:
- In response to the public outcry over the revelation that the Jackson Co pound kills some pets without ever checking them for microchips, director Colleen Macuk offered a policy shift.
- After I posted a photo of a worker at Memphis Animal Services hanging a cat by the neck with tongs, director Matthew Pepper told us we were not seeing what we were seeing.
- Responding to calls for Shawnee AC to publicly post photos of impounded pets online, Russell Frantz, chief of the police department which oversees the pound, blamed Nigerian scammers.
- Bay Co AC pound in FL kills 76% of its pets. Pound manager Bill Olasin told the local paper he suspects his staff members lie about the reasons they kill such an astronomical number of pets, coding most of the killings as behavioral or medical cases instead of the truth.
Number one is certainly the most ridiculous. Oh, you’ll let me know that you killed my cat, which had proper identification, but you were to lazy/incompetent to check for it? How very considerate.
Indeed, she has an early and strong lead, but I am hopeful for a surprising come-from-behind finish for one of the other contenders. Just because I always root for the underdog.
Yep. Comment #1 takes the cake for me. You cant fix stupid.
Anything they say is always more like an excuse to gloss over whatever they’ve already done wrong, and it’s the cats & dogs that pay with their lives.
Shame on them all.
Number one is the most ridiculous, but number three is the saddest because so many shelters claim “respiratory infection” as an excuse to kill, so they can then claim they do not kill healthy animals. Bill Olasin is just the only pound manager stupid enough to say it out loud.
I tweeted and Facebooked (do the same please): Have you voted yet? #AnimalShelter Directors Say the Darndest Things http://ow.ly/8ITrO #Pets SHARE
No. 1 hits a lot of high points: appalling lack of empathy, refusal to acknowledge that the problem, the handling of frightened or feral cats, is one for which there are readily available and practical solutions, and, last but not least, a ‘commitment’ which does absolutely nothing to address the actual causes of the tragedies that made the statement necessary. So I voted for it.
But I also couldn’t resist voting for No. 3, because I’m just boggled by it.
Really, I wanted to vote for all of them.
I agree. I want to know how much time the shelter director spends online searching for the Nigerian scams using those pictures. I want to see the proof! Many shelter animal pictures are not good anyway so who would want to use them. The majority of pirated animal pictures are from breeders websites.
Wild speculation time: I would guess the guy barely knows how to navigate the web. Prolly just gets e-mail. On AOL.
This is a great idea, making fun of these people. There isn’t enough of this in the No Kill movement.
I voted for Colleen Macuk because she included The Crazy in the actual wording of her sentence, whereas for the others, you had to be given a bit of context.
However, it was a tough call because all of these are so stupid and cruel.
Maybe you could run a contest like this every month, and have a place to compile/archive both the contenders and the contest results!
I will think about your idea Karen. There is a fine line between making fun of stupid things people say in defense of abusing/killing shelter pets and making it personal. I try to remain focused on the former and, although I know regular readers are aware of my writing style, I have to bear in mind that someone new may come to the blog and I wouldn’t want to give the impression that we are PERSONALLY hating on anyone. If that makes sense. That said, I don’t think this poll comes across as personal in the way I try to avoid and that’s why I posted it. If I can craft more things like it, I will. God knows there’s a wealth of material. It’s always good to have some lighter posts on the blog too.
Thinking about this and the newbies that come around….and the wealth of info that they basically hand you – you should write a book titled “Shelter Directors Say the Darndest Things” and get it published then donate ALL the proceeds to the No Kill Movement OR set you a fund to use when things like Mario come up. That way people can buy it and you don’t have to worry about offending anyone AND the proceeds will go to a good cause. Plus that way you can do a disclaimer of sorts in the beginning to explain why you are writing it.
When I said that “they hand you” – just to clarify I meant the shelter directors NOT the newbies!
Couldn’t resist – I HAD to vote for all 4 reasons. As far as I am concerned if you are going to work in a shelters, as a leader for the employees and supposed to be the ONE who has the animals BEST interest at heart, not to mention being the one to speak to the public – you have this image to uphold (shouldn’t be hard to do because they SHOULD be doing it all the time!) and when they open mouth-insert foot it’s kinda telling that they don’t behave with the animals best interest.
They are ALL sad. And I feel for any animals that end up in their possession, because they don’t have a chance in hell. Unfortunate.
Since I have started advocating for shelter animals on line. I have seen some heart breaking things. It’s horrible enough they are killing these poor babies without even checking for chips, but torturing them before they die, is just unspeakable. God help these poor babies.
HAD to vote for all four. Just four degrees of stupid, y’know? although Number one, wow, that’s at least a PhD (Piled Higher and Deeper).