Animal shelters
A pet is a lifetime commitment, theirs or yours. If you can no longer care for them it is your personal responsibility to find them a good home or put them down. There is no world where it acceptable to dump them off at a shelter, or on the side of a road.
The recent shelter mess in my area has put this topic on my mind on almost a daily basis. I know the man responsible for the shelter, and it looks like he is also responsible for the killing of hundreds of dogs during the decades that he has run this “no-Kill” shelter. Other shelters have paid this shelter to re-home their animals, and this financial gain looks like the reason for all this “criminal” activity. “Public” shelters in the area where they exist kill upwards of 1000 animals a year, and that’s legal. You can see where a person could justify their activity to themselves by finding a percentage of animals headed to the rainbow bridge homes while “humanely” dispatching the rest. Some people are in an uproar about “shooting dogs” being cruel. Having killed hundreds of animals in my life, I would classify a bullet to the brain as probably the third most humane way to dispatch any animal, following drug and decapitation. I put down my own cat at 12, I did it with a shovel, and to this day I wish I had used a rifle.
I gave my LGD to this very shelter almost a decade ago. I was experiencing serious brain issues, needed to relocate to Los Angles to seek some sort of help. I sold all my goats, and took my LGD to the shelter. I asked if they could house her until I came back. I knew they had been losing a chicken a week to some predator, and once my LGD took up residence there that stopped. She spent over 8 years there, passing away just last year. I could have taken her back 2 years after I took her there, though I knew on some level she was in a good place, that she was doing her job, and that she was loved and appreciated. I found her a home that I determined was good, and rather than forcing her to move again, I left her there. In my opinion I did the best I could for her. Even when I had predator problems on my sheep in Oregon I did not consider moving her. When we as humans take guardianship over any animals we need to continue to make the best choices for them as long as they are alive.
When I was 12 my male cat would roam the neighborhood, one day he came home missing his two front feet. His legs had been severed at about his elbows by an animal trap that had been sharpened to do exactly that. A cruel land owner did not like other animals on his property and this was his solution. I put my cat down because missing his two front legs, and in my fathers estimation the meant he had no quality of life. At that point I had no real understanding, today I agree. My father gave me the choice to put him down myself or he would do it. He recommended the shovel or the gun, foolishly I took the shovel. At 12 this was a critical lesson for me, and despite when some might think, age appropriate. After burying my cat in the manzanita, eyes full of tears I found a couple of the traps on my neighbors land, and threw them through his living room window. I left when I saw him headed for a back room. Foolishly(in a small town) he told people about me doing that, and it quickly got out what happened to my cat, and the personal backlash he received was overwhelming.
In a previous era people would drown unwanted puppies or kittens, rather than put them out into the world without good homes. Today that’s considered cruel, and instead those same unwanted puppies and kittens get dropped off on the side of the road, or to some shelter. Less than 30% of animals dropped at any shelter end up finding homes. It is much like my article one “guardrails” on highways, the fact they are there leads people to drive at an unsafe speed because they have that extra safety. The “shelter” reality has allowed people to take on pets they have no business taking on, knowing that if it does not work out the animal can always be dropped off at a shelter and it becomes someone else’s problem. We need a new reality, one where people take responsibility for the animals who they take on. If those people had to take that dog they did not want out into a field and put a bullet in it rather than drop it off at a shelter, they might think twice about taking on an animal. I”m still on felony probation, and I have realized it’s part of why I I have not taken on a dog. If I go back to prison, what happens to that animal?
The shelter reality here is this country is on very thin ice. Many municipal shelters have closed due to high costs and overloading. Many private shelters are more driven by profit than success, leading to messes like we have here in Humboldt. As these shelters continue to run into financial, legal, ethical, and functional difficulty, there are going to be less and less of them available. The lack of “guardrails” is not going to change the driving habits fo the public. We have a systemic problem in this country and there is very little we can do. A good first step is to make spay/neuter/vasectomy free for all dogs and cats. As I have discussed before, we live in a monocracy, to do our part in this change it’s how we allocate our money. Personally I will no longer support any shelters, rather will turn that support to free spay/neuter/vasectomy services.