I know this is a political blog, but it's Friday. Rather than blog about my cats or post their pictures on this traditional cat blogging day, I thought I'd write this diary about a topic related to pets and the government.
There is a revolution starting, a revolution to save the lives of millions of cats and dogs. We've been doing a lot of killing in our lives. No, not just the criminals and the politicians, but all of us. I'm not talking about Iraq, or crime, or anything to do with human life. I'm talking about the animals. We have all been killing them, 5 million of them every year by some counts.
I'm not an animal rights person, I'm not going to tell you about laws that we need (just the opposite) and I'm not going to lecture you about spaying or neutering your pet. I want to talk to you about your government and how you want it to behave. Do you want your government to kill animals, or do you want your government to save lives? Even if you care nothing for these animals, do you want your government spending your tax dollars on an inefficient method of animal control, or do you want your government to do what is necessary to spend less? If you said save lives and save money, then read on.
For far too long we have allowed animal control to kill animals under the pretense of doing what is needed for the public welfare and safety. We've covered ourselves with euphamisms, like euthanasia and humane death. But what has been going on is nothing short of government conducted murder of helpless cats and dogs whose only crime was homelessness. And we've just watched it hapen. As long as we didn't see it, as long as the killing took place in "shelters" tucked away in hard to find places out of the way of our normal lives, we convinced ourselves that this killing had to be done and that it was okay. We bought the myth that we have a pet overpopulation problem, we bought it without question and without any intention of doing anything about it. We are cowards and we are murderers. It's time to say enough and stop the killing, it's time for a revolution - the No-Kill revolution.
There is a new book that every pet lover should read - "Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill REvolution In America" by Nathan Winograd. This book is our salvation, rather the salvation of millions of cats and dogs. It will make you cry, and it will make you angry, but it will save lives. Winograd is a lawyer and former criminal prosecutor who has been working in shelters for over a decade. He was part of the success of the San Francisco SPCA in the 90s in turning San Francisco into a city where the vast majority of animals that passed through animal control lived rather than died. He went further as director of Tompkins County SPCA in New York by making Tompkins county the nation's first No Kill community "saving 100% of healthy animals, 100% of sick and injured but treatable animals, and 100% of feral cats." He did this without mandatory laws and without support from PETA and without support from HSUS. In fact, PETA and HSUS actively oppose Nathan's methods. You can read more about Nathan on his website, but back to the book.
The story begins with Henry Bergh, founder of the first SPCA in NYC in 1866. Bergh worked for exactly what SPCA stands for - the prevention of cruelty to animals. After his death, his society was hi-jacked. Instead of working against animal cruelty, the NYC SPCA took over animal sheltering in NYC and began killing animals. And this happened all over the country - SPCA's and Humane Societies become arms of the local governments for killing the animals they were supposed to protect. Somehow, these groups and the national organizations like HSUS fell into a trap. When they began killing animals, they had to justify it to themselves. Rather than looking for ways to stop the killing, they just looked for excuses for their activities and these excuses allowed them to continue. With each new generation, new killers adopted the same excuses without question.
The first excuse is a whopper - there are too many animals and not enough homes. Pet overpopulation is a myth and as Winograd says, it has become a religion that shelter workers use to justify continued killing.
[Pet overpulation] is the political cover that prevents even the animal rescuers and advocates from demanding an immediate end to the whole bloody mess. And, at its core, it is an unsupportable myth. The syllogism goes as follows: shelters kill a lot of animals; shelters adopt out few of them; therefore, there are more animals than homes. Hence, there is pet overpopulation. It is as faulty a syllogism and as untrue a propositionas esists in sheltering today. But people believe it, and because they do, local governments under-fund their shelters, appoint and retain incompetent employees in animal control, and give shelter directors the carte blance they need to kill because the problem is portrayed as insurmountable.
The next excuse is to blame the public. The irresponsible public causes shelter killings because we don't spay and neuter our pets and we don't confine them. This excuse leads to my particular favorite non-sequitor - we need laws to make the public behave responsibly. Legislation is based on a belief that "the public [is] "bad" and [has] to be "punished" and "coerced" into doing the right thing." As Winograd says "Even if HSUS and the others were right, the law would nevertheless miss its intended target since responsible people acted resonsibly whether there was a law or not, while truly irresponsible people would merely ignore it." What's worse, the true irony of coercive legislation is that at a time when animal control is killing cats and dogs by the millions, these laws give them the power to impound and kill even more.
And still another excuse is to blame the animals.
To encourage health and local government officials to pass these types of laws, HSUS ultimately would encourage local shelters to blame cats for everything from plagues to car accidents, arguing that they are a human health threat and that they erode the foundations of neighborhoods. The very groups which were founded to protect animals, elevate their status in society, and promote the viewpoint that their lives are precious and they are entitled to care, compassion, and the right to be free of suffering, were instead denigrating and condemning animals.
There's a saying I've heard for years - when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Too many people believe they need to write laws to make things happen, because that's all they know how to do. Want people to spay/neuter their pets? Write a law making it mandatory. Want to decrease shelter intakes? Write a law limiting how many pets people can have. Want to get people to pick up their cats from shelters? Write a law requiring cats to be licensed. The problem is, none of these laws work, they are costly to enforce if enforceable at all, and they can have opposite effects. If the consequence of disobeying a law is the pet is impounded, and if it's too costly or inconvenient to obey the law, the pet will lose. Shelter intakes will increase. And why limit the number of pets someone can have? That just decreases the availability of homes for shelter pets. License a cat? Who will license the millions of feral cats in the country that contribute the most to shelter numbers?
What Winograd has given us is another tool. We don't need to use the hammer, and in fact we'll make matters worse doing so. Winograd's No Kill Equation is doesn't require any laws. We can save millions of lives right now.
So what does Winograd suggest that animal control do with impounded cats and dogs? His suggestion is utter simplicity itself - common sense! The No Kill Equation is at it's most basic form just common sense.
Feral Cat TNR - for decades, the only way animal control dealt with feral cat colonies was the round-up-and-kill method. Then along came some determined caretakers who proved there could be a different approach - Trap, Neuter, Return. Why kill the cats? Why not just alter them and put them back where they were? TNR has worked time and time again across the country. It's just common sense.
High-Volume, Low-Cost Spay/Neuter - the biggest impediment to the public altering their pets is the exhorbitant cost (in my area, it can be as much as $200 to alter a cat and some vets require two separate visits). The second biggest impediment is access to s/n. A low income family with one parent who has $200 a week to spend on food and works full time is not going to spend the money to fix the family cat, much less arrange to take the cat to vet twice. If we want people to behave in a certain way, we have to make it easy for them do what we want. Low-cost S/N, S/N clinics on weekend, clinics that pick animals up from people and drop them off when done, mobile clinics, incentives to get people to alter their pets (why not just pay them $5 to fix the family cat rather than spend hundreds killing the kittens?). Again, just common sense.
Rescue Groups - allow rescue groups access to all animals at any time to get them out of the shelter and into a home.
Foster Care - rather than kill underage kittens, let a foster home care for them until they are ready for adoption.
Comprehensive Adoption Programs - make the adoption hours reasonable for working families (nights and weekends), take the animals to the public rather than expect the public to find the animal shelter. Advertise animals in local papers and use the media to help reach potential homes.
Pet Retention - help people solve the problems that lead to giving up a pet with programs like dog obedience training, dog walker referrals, pet behavior classes, etc.
Medical and Behavior Rehabilitation - treat sick animals rather than just kill them.
Public Relations/Community Involvement - the public wants to be heroic, they want to save lives. In a nation where tens of millions of homes have pets, where people celebrate their pet's birthday, were we talk to our pets and sleep with our pets, we have many people just aching to be heroic and work toward making their community No Kill. Reach out to the public for their support.
Volunteers - let volunteers walk the dogs, socialize the animals, groom the cats and contribute to the No Kill effort.
A Compassionate Director - last but not least, no lives can be saved unless the shelter director wants to save them. Too many are mired in the myth of pet overpopulation and in the maintaining the status quo of killing every animal they possibly can. These directors have to go, or we will continue to be a country where we needlessly kill millions of animals every year for no other reason than that the shelter directors are too lazy to try to save them. To change what we do, we must change the paradigm of how we handle animal control, and that means changing the people who do so.
There is so much more to the book. Winograd describes several success stories and how several counties saved thousands of animals by following his No Kill Equation. I urge you to get a copy and read it. For the love of your pets, please read this book. If it doesn't spur you to action, at the very least you'll understand why so many of us fight ridiculous animal laws like mandatory spay/neuter, pit bull bans, pet limits, and cat licensing.
So enough about the pets for now, back to politics as usual until next Friday. And now for the poll!