Donors Pay for the Killing of Thousands of Animals a Year at Private CA Shelter

The SPCA for Monterey County in CA has a bunch of lies about no kill on its website in a feeble attempt to make killing more palatable to donors. We don’t turn animals away, killing is a kindness, blah blah bullshit.

The private non-profit could turn animals away, since it doesn’t appear to hold any animal control contracts, but instead chooses to accept every animal that comes through its front doors.  Tragically, the SPCA then sends roughly half of them out the back door, their bodies piled in barrels which get stored in a walk-in freezer.

The Monterey County Weekly published a lengthy piece on the SPCA for Monterey County and specifically, the killing that goes on in a room they refused to allow the paper to see.  The director, who gets paid close to $300 grand a year, is retiring after 16 years on the job:

“We save many of these animals but as of yet, we cannot save all of them,” outgoing SPCA Executive Director Gary Tiscornia says. “These are the decisions we have to make.”

Not have to – choose to. They choose to take in all these animals then choose to kill more than 2700 of them a year.

Euthanasia rates increased along with the intake of animals into the shelter. […] Every year, numbers steadily increased, and Tiscornia alludes to the policies of Monterey County’s and Salinas’ animal shelters as possible culprits, in addition to an influx of feral cats, which are almost always euthanized at the SPCA due to behavioral issues.
[…]
Tiscornia says it’s important to look at external factors influencing his organization’s numbers, not just the policies within his nonprofit. Here he is referring to a sterilization program run out of the Salinas animal services shelter that releases feral cats back into the wild after being spayed and neutered.

This, he says, has influenced the nonprofit’s high euthanasia record, as it received more feral cats.

So Salinas is doing its job by neutering and returning feral cats to their home in the community. I get that part. Is Tiscornia saying that his organization then takes those cats, which it has zero obligation to accept, and kills them, because yay killing I guess, so don’t blame us for our kill rate because it’s Salinas’s fault actually?  Three. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars.

And while we’re dazzling the public with the Chewbacca Defense, have you seen our newly remodeled, super fancy adoption center with filtered air, classical music and kitty condos?

But beautifying the adoption center has not been enough. In 2014, nearly 1,000 more animals were put down than adopted. Last year, the number of animals euthanized was just 20 fewer than those who found a loving home.

Tiscornia […] explains those ratios this way: “At the end of the day, the pet’s adoptability determines its fate,” he says.
[…]
“We have only euthanized sick and behaviorally damaged pets,” he says.

The Weekly obtained kill records from the SPCA which are not available on the SPCA website. The paper cites respiratory issues and “hissing when touched” as two of the reasons animals are killed at the facility.

“One of the key reasons for euthanasia is behavior,” Tiscornia says. “Issues like jumping on people, obnoxious behavior.”

Well crappity doo, he just killed every single one of my dogs.

When discussing puppies with mange, Tiscornia again attempts to justify killing:

“If this were a 9-year-old dog with the possibility of recurring mange, the public would not adopt him,” Tiscornia says. “These are the decisions we need to make.”

Not need to – choose to. And who the monkey fighting snake is this guy to decide that no one could possibly love a 9 year old dog who might get mange at some unknown future time?  Better to kill the dog than to take the chance someone might want him and be willing to give him medicine if he ever needs it, I guess.  Three. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars.

Still, the nonprofit continues to pride itself in its open-door policy: taking all animals in need – wild, neglected or sick as they may be – into their care.

“We never turn down an animal,” Dawn Fenton, the SPCA’s education and outreach manager, says. “We make it work.”

And by “we make it work,” she apparently means we totally do not make it work at all because we are killing half the animals. Has it occurred to anyone at the SPCA that if the best they can offer is a spot in the freezer barrel, they not only should but in fact have a moral obligation to turn away animals?

“If we closed, could you imagine what would happen?” SPCA spokesperson Beth Brookhouser says.

Dance party at my house?  Feral cats sipping champagne out of glass slippers?  A parade?

(Thanks Clarice.)