Home Delivery

Animal shelters faulted for pet overpopulation

Denise Flaim | Animal House

March 20, 2008

Article tools

E-mail

Share
- Digg
- Del.icio.us
- Facebook
- Fark
- Google
- Newsvine
- Reddit
- Yahoo

It's the breeders' fault for churning out too many puppies.

It's the owners' fault for lacking the moral fiber to provide a forever home.

Heck, maybe it's the animals' fault, for their persistent fecundity and reliance on we notoriously unreliable humans.

When it comes to the blame game over animal overpopulation, Nathan Winograd has an unusual - some might argue counterintuitive - target: shelters and humane organizations.

Denise Flaim Bio | E-mail | Recent columns

A former attorney and founder of the national No Kill Advocacy Center, Winograd is the author of "Redemption: The Myth of Pet Population and the No Kill Revolution in America" (Almaden, $16.95), which advances an almost unthinkable notion: That shelters and humane organizations are complicit in the overpopulation issue because of an institutional bias - imperative, even - toward killing animals.

For his finger-pointing, Winograd travels back to 19th century New York City, where ASPCA founder Henry Bergh resisted pressure to catch and euthanize strays, instead focusing on cruelty prevention, particularly of horses. When Bergh died, the ASPCA went into the shelter business - and, by extension, Winograd contends, the death industry.

The reasons the imperative to euthanize is so entrenched in animal-sheltering today are varied, Winograd says: The belief that only young, attractive animals spur adoptions. The proliferation of laws aimed at punishing owners for their lapses rather than enlisting them in efforts to help solve the problem of homeless dogs and cats. And - as legislation multiplies for mandated spay-neuter - a disinclination to pursue low- and no-cost sterilization programs because of opposition from veterinary groups protecting their financial turf.

Winograd exposes the arguably twisted culture that has grown up around shelters and the multibillion-dollar humane groups that advocate for them: the idea that a "good" death is preferable to an imperfect life. In this vein, his deconstruction of the reservations against "TNR" (trap/neuter/release) is fascinating: While this approach has helped stop and manage the growth of feral cat colonies, Winograd points out the roadblocks set up by many humane organizations, from concerns about the humaneness of allowing cats to live in the "wild" (albeit with human caretakers providing for their food and medical attention) to campaigns to euthanize these untamed cats because they allegedly decimate bird populations (a fact Winograd deftly disputes, arguing that no cat is a match for a healthy bird, and that McMansion-fueled deforestation is a far bigger threat).

For the crown jewel of the no-kill movement, Winograd points to the San Francisco SPCA, which in the 1990s essentially halted the euthanasia of adoptable animals by savvy marketing and good management: cultivating foster homes, organizing adoption events, simply refusing to say yes to the "blue solution" - sodium pentathol - to make room.

To counteract critics who said San Fran's accomplishments were due to the city's enviable socioeconomics, Winograd himself turned the Tompkins County SPCA in rural Ithaca, N.Y., into a no-kill facility.

"They kill because they make the animals sick through sloppy cleaning and poor handling," Winograd writes of shelters. "They kill because they do not want to care for sick animals. They kill because they think volunteers are more trouble than they are worth. ... They kill because they don't want a foster care program. They kill because they are only open for adoption when people are at work and families have their children in school." The list of self-defeating practices goes on - refusal to work with rescue groups, or walk dogs to prevent "cage craziness."

Winograd, you might guess, is controversial. Shelter managers complain that without resources and funding, Winograd's no-kill vision is unrealistic. They say "no kill" is really "limited admission," and leads to animals dying of disease and overcrowding instead. They call Winograd a publicity monger, a credit-stealer, a liar whose success stories do not bear up under scrutiny.

Whether or not you agree with Winograd's assertion that animal overpopulation is a myth concocted to feed the machine that is the modern American animal shelter, what we can all agree on is that things could always be better. Shelters could accept help when it is forthcoming, not turning away volunteers or rebuffing rescue groups that save the more "desirable" dogs. Municipalities could learn from dog trainers and not punish with licensing and spay/neuter laws, but instead reward positive behavior by offering owner-education events and subsidizing spays and neuters, perhaps even - gasp - totally.

When it comes to animal overpopulation, there is enough blame to go around. And there might be enough homes - if only we could stop the business-as-usual long enough to find them.