Year after year, the primary “service” performed at Memphis Animal Services is killing. City leaders in Memphis have never held anyone accountable for the ongoing failure of the staff to do their jobs – that is, to shelter animals. The system is designed to kill animals and that’s what they do, even in the face of proven, lifesaving alternatives.
Bolstered by killing apologists, MAS director James Rogers goes so far as to call the systemic slaughter of healthy/treatable dogs and cats at his facility “euthanasia” when in fact euthanasia (“easy death”) is a word reserved for mercifully ending the suffering of animals deemed medically hopeless by a veterinarian. All shelter pets have a right to live. There is nothing merciful about killing:
Shelter Director James Rogers said they make every effort to get the strays healthy and adoptable.
“I am not against euthanasia,” Rogers said, “I am against unfair and cruel euthanasia.”
I take this to mean James Rogers believes it’s neither unfair nor cruel to round up homeless pets and kill them. That’s the extent of his business plan. “Make every effort” translates to “make no effort” – just do the same thing year in and year out. Insanity is sometimes loosely defined as repeating the same actions while expecting different results. In Memphis though, they simply repeat the same actions – killing animals – while having no expectations of anything other than rounding up more animals to kill. Not only is Memphis failing to achieve different results with its repetitious actions, the city isn’t even trying for those different results. It’s a scratched record. It’s a set of wash, rinse, repeat instructions where the wash and rinse have been replaced by kill. It’s a loop.
When rappers take the most familiar hook out of a popular song and loop it so it repeats for 5 minutes, they can say anything they want over the top because people are comfortable with that recognizable riff. This is what the city of Memphis has done. MAS kills animals in an endless loop that everyone in the building is comfortable with and city leaders recognize as familiar while James Rogers blathers on about striving for excellence. It’s a hoax.
When asked about the MAS pets who have owners, adopters or rescuers coming for them but are killed anyway, he says:
“We just cry to each other and then just get back in and do it again,” Rogers said.
See, that’s the problem.
(Thanks Clarice for sending in this link.)
This is just SICK!! simply SICK! Stupid and more than this, LAZY!! and what good does it do? If people aren’t EDUCATED in the practice of spaying and neutering, it will never stop. There must be a way to get these animals spayed and neutered without it costing people an arm and a leg. Possibly a fund set up somewhere that people can apply to? Just an idea… ANYTHING beats this practice! They ALL need psychiatric care if you ask me!
Spayed and neutered animals are killed at MAS and many other facilities every single day. That will not help the ones who land in these killing factories.
Bottom line is those whose job is to SHELTER these animals is to provide basic care – shelter, food, medical care, and meet their basic needs. They also are supposed to be moving them out the door alive to be reunited with owners, adopters or rescues. What happens here is that animals are mistreated, neglected, abused and then killed without any regard for their physical or emotional pain.
These facilities need to be held accountable for what they do for the animals in their care – PERIOD!
BTW, I am not against spay/neuter and believe we could be helping people to have that done instead of punishing those who can’t/don’t. However, this is a different problem.
“We just cry to each other and then just get back in and do it again,” Rogers said.
OH.MY.GOD.
The mentality in this place is…apathetic to the point of psychopathy. And it shows.
I find it hard to believe that anyone at MAS has the humanity and soul to even cry about the killing them do on a daily (hourly) basis. It’s all BS to make people think they actually care. We know the truth. Too bad more people in Memphis believe this.
Well said, mikken.
Shirley, would you send this to whatever newspaper(s) there are in Memphis to see if they would print it? Not that I have much hope, of course, but… I know there are maybe a couple dozen people in Memphis who would read it and then go back to that f’ing slaughterhouse to try to get a dog out alive. Out of a population of 670,000 or so, in the disgusting hellhole that city is, that is sad, but about all one can expect.
Oh, and if my comment pisses of more than the couple dozen caring people in the crappiest town in the south I’ve ever had the misfortune to travel through (and which I will NEVER go back to), then stand up and DO SOMETHING!!!!!