How about letting a dog settle into a new situation for 24 hours before temperament testing? Taking a dog (maybe with a catchpole) away from everything it knows, separating it from its companion, and then concluding that its nervousness is aggressiveness is wronging the dogs. Plus, don’t they normally give the owners a certain length of time to claim their dogs?
IMHO, the AC officers acted rashly. Be your logic, the only pets that could be adopted out would be dead pets, since those are the only ones guaranteed not to bite.
Not surprised that you are in the south. Most animal shelters in the south are very overcrowded with unwanted animals, so an adult dog that looks like a Chow (a breed that has a reputation for being aggressive) probably never stood a chance, even if the dog wasn’t actually aggressive.
In an overcrowded shelter, a dog with the sniffles is often killed because a lot of shelter can’t afford to treat even minor illnesses. A dog that acts shy and scared is killed because it is considered “unadoptable”. Many animals don’t get much of a chance because there just aren’t enough homes. It’s terrible that people let this happen to man’s best friend.
My friend who moved from NY to Arkansas is constantly complaining about the irresponsible attitudes of people in rural Arkansas when it comes to pets. He is currently raising a couple of litters of feral kittens and his rural neighbors apparently don’t understand at all why he thinks it is important to get the mom cats fixed. To the neighbors, it’s just fun to have kittens around, and they don’t really understand or care that a lot of the kittens end up dying from starvation/disease/predators/etc.