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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: November/December 2007
Death by economics
Guest Column by Melanie Jackson
In the world of animal welfare the decision to terminate an animal's life is often based on economics rather than the animal's overall health and welfare needs.
To avoid depleting budgets more than the seasonal rhythm of animal control contract payments, donations, and revenue from adoption and surrender fees can be expected to replenish, shelters have for decades typically maintained limits on how long an animal may be held. If the animal is not adopted within that rigid time period, or transferred to a rescue organization that can focus on placing hard cases, the animal will be killed to make room for another animal.
Often the killing is deemed necessary to keep animals from going "kennel crazy," but reality is simply that shelters-- especially shelters housing animals under animal control contracts--usually lack the resources to hold animals either indefinitely or in conditions that prevent "kennel craziness." Animal shelters and rescues receive about 6% of the total sum spent on pets in the U.S. and Canada, and handle about 6% of the total dog and cat population each year, but a proportional share of the money is not enough to provide shelter animals with equivalent care when much of the labor must be paid and the facilities are not maintained as part of a human household budget.
More than 40 years ago, the U.S. Congress determined that five working days was a holding period that gave impounded animals a reasonable chance of being found or adopted, and wrote the five-day hold into the U.S. federal Laboratory Animal Welfare Act of 1966, which was amended into the Animal Welfare Act of 1971. The U.S. federal standard applies only to animals in federally regulated commerce, chiefly those who are sold by shelters to laboratories. This is now only a few thousand animals per year, down from perhaps hundreds of thousands before 1966; but because selling animals to labs was then a major destination of impounded animals, the five-day hold became the default standard for animals with any prospect of any fate except death in the shelter.
The minimum holding period before an impounded animal may be killed, then and now, typically varies from 24 hours to 72 hours. Animals deemed to be "owner surrendered" may be killed immediately, even if the person surrendering the animal may not actually be the person to whom the animal belonged. The advent of microchipping and routine scanning for microchips has revealed that up to 25% of "owner-surrendered" animals are actually "surrendered" by someone else, to whom the animal was a nuisance or a perceived rival for attention and affection in a troubled personal relationship.
Back when half as many shelters in the U.S. and Canada were killing six times as many animals as today, most shelters struggled to conceal the extent of the killing from the public. In recent years, some shelters and many rescue groups working to place shelter animals use a "death row" approach to encourage visitors to choose animals whose time is nearly up, by announcing via signs on the animals' cage "You might be this animal's last chance. Rover/Trixie/Stripe will be euthanized on _________ (fill in the date)."
Web sites specializing in presenting photographs and details of "death
row" animals began going up circa 1996, and still have considerable
capacity to shock the public. A new site called
The use of emotional blackmail to try to rehome animals could be considered appalling, and shelter marketing research long ago demonstrated that it is much less effective that the positive, upbeat approach used by high-volume no-kill adoption shelters and rescue networks--but the animals on death row tend to be those who have been rejected for one reason or another by the high-volume placement agencies, for whom there may be no other chance.
More appalling than the desperation tactics of the people trying to save doomed animals' lives is being in the back room of a shelter when the animals are culled, seeing rows and rows of dead animals laid out on garbage bags to make room for the unending flow of new animals soon to arrive.
Directors of organizations that choose to operate in this manner typically state that the prolific nature of unaltered domestic pets, human irresponsibility, and the necessity of keeping shelters financially viable necessitates this approach.
But does it really? I have had the privilege of working in an animal shelter at the management level, a shelter whose board of directors had chosen for moral reasons not to make space by killing animals. I worked for the Victoria County Humane Society, a very small, volunteer-driven charity serving a large rural area in the Kawartha Lakes region of Ontario. The Victoria County Humane Society accepts both dogs and cats from the public, and houses dogs for the local animal control district, which does not handle cats. The Victoria County Humane Society kills animals only when extreme health or unsafe behavior dictates killing them.
I don't believe I could have worked there otherwise. Knowing that animals have only a limited time in which to be adopted is stressful for the staff and volunteers, and I suspect I am not alone in believing that shelter animals perceive the stress through their contact with their human caregivers. Being in an environment in which there is security of life is mentally and emotionally preferable for humans and animals alike.
Our fundraising staff and volunteers all worked really, really hard to keep funds coming in, as the shelter did not rely on a predictable budget based on planned turnover. The community appreciated that the animals were valued as individuals, not as a commodity, and gave generously.
Did we work harder than the fundraisers and volunteers for shelters with a finite holding period? That could be debated. The reality of high-volume killing was long concealed because fundraisers knew the difficulty of raising money while doing such unpopular work. Fundraisers for open admission shelters are still extremely sensitive about other shelters' use of the term "no kill," because they understand that no-kill shelters have a fundraising advantage. But this raises the question as to why shelters choose a modus operandi which compels them to work just as hard for less return in public support and appreciation, while saving fewer animals.
I find the fundamental hypocrisy of this issue interesting. Organizations exemplify their compassion by trumpeting their mission to support animal welfare, while in the back room killing animals to keep a revenue balance which might as easily be kept by simply taking a different approach to their work.
If we were truly humane, we would value each life. The shelter I worked with proved that almost every animal could find a home. Some just took longer than others.
[Melanie Jackson, of Oakwood, Ontario, is an educator, animal
welfare activist, speaker and freelance writer.]
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