If people want to do this, it needs to be done between private shelters. Public tax funded shelters shouldn’t be trying to justify their budgets by bringing in pets made homeless by irresponsible people who don’t pay taxes there. And, there would need to be far better record keeping, so these animals are not counted more than once.
IMO, organizations created to move, foster and place these dogs should deal with it as purebred rescues do, so the shelters aren’t involved at all.
It’s both. If Region A is paying to educate, and they lower their excess numbers to close to zero, not only should they not be paying to cover Region B’s problems, B isn’t going to have any incentive to do anything about them as long as they are shipped elsewhere.
There isn’t an abundant supply of dogs bred for something other than the market or by accident out there. Public education should also include the value of responsibly bred pets vs mill bred vs “designer dogs” vs random bred. In the mean time, yes, a bunch of dogs will be killed but those animal lovers should bend their energies to getting that education out there, and not trying to guilt people into paying big money to take on someone elses “trash” as a family pet.
The problem with ensuring a home for every existing pet is that many of them shouldn’t be in homes, particularly family homes. Dogs that bite, are hyper-active, have long term health issues, are runners, etc are placed out of shelters all the time, and end up in our classes where the family just wants to get a handle on this “poor abused creature”. Many times they give up and the dog ends up back in the shelter, usually even more messed up.
I’m not trying to have it both ways. I’m actually in favor of a sort of tough approach - you bring your pet to the shelter, you sign a form that says you know it’s going to die. People need to understand the result of dumping their irresponsibility off on others. The realities of shelters should be taught in the schools. People need to get away from the idea that all dogs are equal and all deserve homes and focus more on getting the public to put at least as much effort into the purchase and care of their pets as they do their cars.
Well, if their local taxpayers want to rescue and adopt homeless pets, then they have to get the pets from somewhere.
You’re viewing shelters as something like the municipal poorhouses of an earlier era, where local taxpayers contributed money to provide minimal food and shelter for destitute residents, but were very strict about not taking in any destitute people from outside the local area. The other way to view shelters is as something like another obsolete institution that might be described as “orphan placement services”, where local families would seek a “bound-out” boy or girl to provide labor in exchange for care and education, and if there weren’t enough orphans available in the local community to meet the demand then the orphanage had to import some.
Like I said, I’m not particularly concerned with which model a community chooses, but it’s not as though the “poorhouse” model is somehow automatically more valid than the “orphanage” model.
Local taxpayers are not given the choice as to whether or not to pay to support their shelters, whether they adopt from there or not. I’ve been paying to support our city and county shelters for 20 years and all I’ve ever adopted has been the cat. Which I’m sure I could have gotten elsewhere. For much less.
Seriously? Good lord.
Anyway, I cannot imagine that there were that many orphans around overall, certainly not tens of thousands?
I think it is if for no other reason than if a region with tons of irresponsible people can just ship their problems away, that region is going to keep creating more and more unwanted pets. Such as shipping street dogs from Mexico to California just makes more room for more street dogs to be created.
Once an area has succeeded in reducing their unwanted pets significantly, they should be able to close or reduce the size of their shelter. Here, many cities use the county shelter because there aren’t enough unwanted pets to make it worthwhile to run their own facility.
Irrelevant. People without children aren’t given the choice as to whether or not to pay to support schools, either. The question is not “am I personally going to adopt a local tax-funded shelter pet?” but “do we as a community want to rescue unwanted animals for local pet owners to adopt?”
If your answer to that question is “no”, then you should vote against that policy in your local government(s). If you’re getting outvoted by fellow-constituents who have a different answer, well, that’s democracy.
Sounds like exactly the sort of setup you’re advocating. Maybe you would be happier living in one of those other cities in your county, rather than in a city that still maintains its own shelter facility.
It’s estimated that over 120,000 homeless children were shipped out West to be placed with adoptive families in the last half of the 19th century from New York City alone. Orphanages in other cities didn’t have such a continent-wide placement network as the New York Children’s Aid Society did, but they definitely served communities beyond their immediate localities in placing orphans. Of course, even back in the 19th century it was considered more unacceptable to kill an orphaned child than an ownerless cat or dog, so there was lots of pressure to adopt out children even if it meant you had to go pretty far afield to find families for them.
That seems to be the attitude that today’s “No Kill” shelter movement is trying to encourage with regard to pets: i.e., don’t ever euthanize a healthy one and employ every possible means to ensure that each one can be adopted. If that’s the approach you’re complaining is degrading the pet population, then ISTM that your beef is ultimately more with the “No Kill” movement than with PETA.
The problem appears to be that you think the primary function of a public shelter is to “rescue” animals for people to adopt. A public shelter is there for the most part to warehouse animals either dropped off by owners that no longer want them or picked up running at large , with some warehousing of animals taken from abusive situations and in the case of my city, seized in dog fight busts. In the latter case, many if not most of those animals are put down without seeing the adoption side because rehabbing them would cost too much and take too long.
A public shelter isn’t a pet store - they do try to place the owner surrenders, and the at-large animals after the waiting period, but their primary function is to essentially keep the number of free roaming animals down, and to give people someplace other than a farm in the county a place to dump their unwanted pets.
Shelters are not something we get to vote on.
This doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the part of my post you quoted. I don’t know what sort of setup you think I’m advocating, and my city doesn’t have its own shelter any more.
No - interesting idea.
Two things with that. It appears it was done by private agencies, and it sure didn’t do anything to stop the problem of homeless and/or neglected children. It’s the same problem as with shipping strays around - it deals with the immediate issue, but does nothing about that actual problem.
No Kill shelters come in a wide variety of, um, dedication to the cause? Some are like you say - keeping any healthy animal until someone buys it, tho any animal that is warehoused long enough isn’t going to be mentally healthy. Others are completely No Kill and can end up keeping animals in horrid conditions due to overcrowding and underfunding. I don’t really have much in the way of an opinion on them because they aren’t organized, nor trying to force changes in laws. Unlike PETA.
If No Kills want to ship pets around, I don’t care. It’s the public shelters that I don’t think should be taking responsibility for animals from outside their purview.
See, that’s part of your problem. The way you define shelter is a way that many modern shelters want to distance themselves from. Yes, they are a warehouse for abandoned pets, pets trapped on the streets, and all sorts of legal cases. But most people are loath to work in an environment that does not care about the animals and does the bare minimum to keep the animals alive until they’re magically adopted or killed. Even shelters that will euthanize strive to do what they can to save and adopt out as many pets as they can.
This is the dual problem with the PETA shelter. First, that it is a kill shelter, when by its PR, it should be a no-kill (like many humane societies’ shelters). Second, that its numbers for euthanasia were too low even compared to other traditional shelters. Implying they were not doing as much as they could to reduce the numbers of animal killings.
Of course you do. In 1985, when the humane society I used to work for took over the animal shelter, it was a warehouse shelter run by ex-cons who didn’t give a crap about the animals. The county commissioners voted to turn the contract over to the humane society.
AT ANY POINT, locals could have put pressure on their commissioners to take the contract back and revert the shelter from an adoption center to a warehouse. If the county commissioners failed to heed this hypothetical public will, they could have been replaced through votes with new commissioners.
But that didn’t happen. That doesn’t happen. Because most of your fellow citizens disagree with you on the role of an animal shelter.
The only sense in which you don’t get to vote on shelters is the sense in which you don’t get to vote on anything. In our representative democracy, you vote for representatives, and that’s an indirect vote for what you believe in.
It’s not about what I personally think: my point was that it’s up to the people in a community to decide, within the confines of existing legislation, how to implement animal welfare policies in their community. Karl and LHod have already explained that majorities in many communities do see rescuing animals for people to adopt as a vital function of a shelter.
Actually, the Children’s Aid Society and their “orphan trains” did play a large role in improving child welfare in American cities in that era. They drew attention to abuse and neglect of impoverished children and eventually inspired some of the early legislation on child labor and child abuse.
And of course, back in the 19th century it wasn’t like there was a lot of choice between public and private institutions for child welfare: there weren’t any public institutions for child welfare to speak of. Other than locally funded schools and poorhouses in some municipalities, private charity was the only recourse.
Ha ha HA! Good one. The No Kill Advocacy Center and No Kill Nation are just two of the several organizations active in the No Kill movement, and they promote the model Companion Animal Protection Act (CAPA) legislation that would implement its principles in law. See summaries of their legislative efforts at the Rescue 50 website. CAPA’s first aim is specified to be “establishing the shelter’s primary role as saving the lives of animals”. Legislation on this model has been introduced in several states and is currently in effect in Delaware (and, I think, other localities as well on the county level).
This I don’t understand; that is, besides your saying that PETA’s euthanasia numbers “were too low” when I think you must have meant “too high”.
As I’ve posted, from everything I could see in PETA’s PR about this shelter, they were quite upfront about the fact that it’s a “shelter of last resort”. Meaning that they get a lot of seriously unwanted animals, even ones that other shelters won’t take, and a lot of animals from poor people who can’t afford to pay a vet for euthanasia.
I would expect that such a facility would do a LOT of euthanizations relative to the number of animals that pass through its doors, and AFAICT PETA makes no secret of the fact that that’s indeed what they do.
My bad, I was writing and mixed “too high euthanasia” and “too low adoption” numbers. I meant to say, “too low adoption numbers” and “too high euthanasia numbers”.
I said nothing about “bare minimum to keep the animals alive until they’re magically adopted or killed”. City/county shelters are put in place to help control/prevent problems with free roaming pets. Because no one wants to just kill everything that comes in, they also try to place the abandoned ones but that just a side result of their primary function. If the city/county the shelter serves manages to reduce their abandoned pets to nil, the shelter closes because it isn’t a pet store.
I don’t know what you are saying or responding to here.
So, you are assuming that every city/county’s shelters are run by the same laws/procedures as the yours?
Huh. So all those things on the ballots other than candidates - people weren’t really voting on them?
“A” shelter covers a wide variety of things. If you ask folks if their animal control shelter should stay open even tho there are few or no unwanted animals in their city/county, do you really think they would say yes? My own city is an example of that - our abandoned pet levels had gotten so low that there wasn’t any real reason for the city to maintain it’s own animal control facility, so they send what we do get to the county animal control shelter. Several other cities have done the same thing.
Except for child labor, it doesn’t appear to have stuck. Still have plenty of unwanted, under fed, abused kids around.
Orphanages and all that were all private?
Ah, OK - since I don’t have much of an opinion on no-kill shelters, I haven’t been paying attention to them and didn’t know there was any organization. I’m sorry to hear that they are forcing legislation that says any shelter’s primary role is to save lives since that will just make the problem worse.
:dubious: If you think that the problem of neglected urban children nowadays is anywhere near what it was like a hundred and fifty years ago, there’s a bridge you might be interested in buying.
:dubious: :dubious:
I’ll make you a deal, curlcoat: you tell me how you naively imagined the American child-welfare system was organized back in the mid-19th century, and if I think it’s sufficiently amusing, I’ll provide links to some sources where you can find out some actual facts about it.
Your problem’s not that you initially ask questions: it’s that you don’t listen to the answers.
:rolleyes: Tell me, curlcoat, if you don’t pay attention to or don’t believe what I say when I tell you something the first time, why should I bother repeating it for you?
If what you mean is “Cite?”, then say so. But if you just don’t like what you hear because it disagrees with your preconceived notions, don’t simply repeat the question in hopes of getting a different answer.
Not sufficiently amusing. You’ll have to go look up information on 19th-century orphanages for yourself—or, as is more likely, just derp around as usual complaining that nobody is answering your questions, or at least nobody’s giving you the answer you want to hear.
OK then asshole, I’m sorry I forgot that one bit of the side discussion in one thread. I realize that it’s part of a post by you, but I’m afraid I just don’t find you all that important. Sorry.
The New York Times has a story entitled, PETA Finds Itself on Receiving End of Others’ Anger. It doesn’t delve into PETA’s alleged motivations, merely that members of the no-kill movement don’t like them. The story quotes Winograd, but they also quote others.
“No-kill”, btw, essentially means something like “10% euthanize”. They achieve these rates partly by giving the animals more bed space, thereby reducing the transmission of infectious disease. Healthier animals are easier to adopt. The no-kill movement has been boosted by a Maddy’s Fund, established by a dot-com millionaire.
Richard Avanzino of Maddy’s Fund characterizes PETA’s low adoption rates as “Outdated” and “absolute idiocy.” Maddy’s Fund has teamed with the Ad Council: they have establishment cred, FWIW.
A slide show largely sympathetic to PETA is here: PETA Under Fire From ‘No Kill’ Groups - The New York Times
Kate Hurley, the director of shelter medicine at the University of California, Davis, especially likes shelters with a catch, spay and release policy for feral cats: “If they came from an alley, they know how to live in an alley, and if they’re spayed, they’re not making new cats,” she said. “The pieces for no-kill are in place. We just need to spread the word and make sure shelters have the resources and know-how.” The article does not mention the plight of native plants and animals and the effects of invasive feral cats. I side with the birds, fish, salamanders, amphibians, reptiles and native rodents on that issue. Send kitty to PETA and let them handle it. OTOH, if Stray Cat truly resides in an alley with Norway rats and pigeons, then I’m happy to let the non-native species battle it out among themselves.
Definitely true, and I should also say that Maddy’s Fund and its effects on sheltering are mostly after my time. I don’t know the real effect they’ve had on shelters–when they were just getting going (or at least when my shelter first applied for funding through them), there was a fear that shelters would engage in NCLB-like shenanigans to get their statistics to an acceptable level for Maddy’s Fund. But I don’t know what’s really happened.