Last year, a family called PETA seeking help for their dying cat. The
cat was elderly, rail thin, cold to the touch, moaning and too weak even to
lift his head. Despite his hopeless condition, a local "no-kill"
shelter had refused to help him because the family could not afford the mandatory
40-dollar surrender fee.
That's
just one example of how "no-kill" policies--which some people are
pressuring animal shelters across the country to adopt--make shelters' euthanasia
statistics look good but leave desperate animals high and dry.
PETA
and other open-admission
animal shelters are there for thousands of local animals like that dying
cat. A Virginia official speaking of PETA's euthanasia rate acknowledged to USA
Today, "PETA will basically
take anything that comes through the door, and other shelters won't do that."
Turning away animals might allow "no-kill" facilities to boast that
they "never euthanize," but it takes a certain lack of conscience to slam
the door in the face of an animal in desperate need.
If
a community becomes "no-kill" before first becoming "no-birth," consider where tens of thousands of cast-off animals each
year will end up. Animals
who are turned away by "no-kill" shelters don't vanish into thin air.
They are dumped on the streets, sentenced to a miserable life on a chain or
in a dirty pen in the yard of someone who doesn't even want them or cruelly killed by people who are desperate to get rid of
them.
This
scenario plays out wherever communities become more concerned with statistics
than helping individual animals. In Easton, Pennsylvania, the homeless cat
population exploded after the local shelter became "no-kill" and was perpetually
too full to accept strays. The town's exasperated mayor commented, "The no-kill killed us. That's what
did it."
Even
animals who are accepted into "no-kill"
facilities are far from safe. This month, a Humane Society of North Texas
investigator found 91 sick and emaciated cats inside a feces-strewn trailer run
by a self-professed "rescuer." The cats had been handed over to the
hoarder by the city of Fort Worth as part of a push to reduce its euthanasia
rates.
At
Florida's "no-kill" Caboodle Ranch,
a PETA investigation found nearly 700
cats in
moldy trailers that reeked of
ammonia and wooden sheds that were strewn with vomit, trash and waste. Cats
suffering from severe upper-respiratory infections gasped for air and struggled
to breathe. One cat was left to languish for months with a perforated cornea
and eventually died.
Animals need more than a roof over
their heads. They need a committed guardian who will love and care for them for
life. Every
animal born can have such a home if we concentrate on the right end of this
tragedy.
As
many readers know, PETA has led the charge against animal homelessness
in our own community by sterilizing--for free or a token amount--more than 80,000
animals in the last decade. To solve this problem without harming animals in
the effort, we must all work together to implement mandatory spay/neuter laws,
outlaw animal sales at pet shops, sterilize our own and our neighbors' animals,
and visit less fortunate areas to help those who do not have the resources to
sterilize their animals. Turning away unwanted animals or handing them over to
unregulated "rescues," which is inevitable in a "no-kill
community," will only increase animal
neglect and deaths in our neighborhoods.
Teresa
Chagrin is an animal care and control specialist in People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals' (PETA) Cruelty Investigations Department, 501 Front St.,
Norfolk, VA 23510; www.PETA.org.
