OH Shelter Clings to Its Terrible Behavioral Assessments and Its Fatal Plus

That asinine plastic hand is waving more shelter dogs into the kill room – this time at the Franklin Co Dog Shelter in Ohio.  Just how many dogs are being killed because they don’t wag their tails and exclaim, “Thank you sir, may I have another?” when someone jabs them in the face with a fake hand on a stick while they are trying to eat is a matter of dispute.  Volunteers say way too many.  The assistant director says zero. Then there are the numbers:

Last year, [Franklin Co] recorded an 82 percent success rate of adopting, rescuing, or reclaiming dogs.
[…]
In March alone, 139 [dogs] were euthanized. Debbie Finelli, Assistant Director Franklin County Dog Shelter says that’s because 52 out of the 140 dogs that came in were terminally ill or terminally injured. “I couldn’t do anything for those,” she explains.

If I’m reading this correctly, 140 dogs came in and 139 were killed in March. Of the 139, 87 were apparently either healthy or possibly had some treatable minor illness/injury. So she “couldn’t do anything” for 52 of the dogs and didn’t do anything, except killing, for the other 87. BUTOFCOURSE:

“I don’t like to euthanize. (I) wish I never had to, but we’re an open shelter (and) have to take every dog that comes in here.”

*drink*

Several shelter vols who spoke with the local news on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution (stellar indicator of a progressive shelter) say that many dogs are needlessly killed after failing to bow to the Fake Hand of God. Which has mercifully declined in use over the years:

The ASPCA tells 10TV “We have determined that food guarding assessments are not useful tools for shelter dogs because they are not reliable predictors of overall behavior in the home.”

The Franklin County dog shelter uses the ASPCA guidelines to run its shelter, but says it has no plans to remove the assessment.

“Maybe when a new director comes in they’ll have the ability to take that out of the behavioral assessment, but at this point, I don’t have the authority to take it out of the assessment, Finelli explains.

Really?  Is that the hill you want to die on?  I wonder what is supposedly necessary for Franklin Co to bring itself into compliance with the guidelines it claims to follow – Act of Congress? Presidential executive order? Directive from a burning bush?

Soooooo we follow the ASPCA guidelines, except for the one that would prevent us from needlessly killing good dogs, which is mostly who we kill, but we don’t like to kill but we kill as many as we take in but we have an 82% save rate.  I guess.

Franklin Co needs to stop putting healthy, friendly dogs in the dumpster and put its pokey-in-the-face-stick there instead.

(Thanks Clarice.)