You aren't really that naive, are you??... I worked intake and animal control dispatch at a shelter where we had numbers between the 50's to 100's coming in every SINGLE day!! Where do you propose those animals go? Please enlighten me... I'd love to hear it <3
I believe you are the one being naive. You've bought the myth.
I started volunteering 30 years ago at a kill shelter and have been involved as a dog walker, rescuer, or fosterer from that point forward. The kill shelter I originally started at is no longer a kill shelter. It services a city of over 1 million and because WE had leadership with vision our communities attitude changed, intakes lowered, and that open admission shelter system has not had to euthanize adoptable healthy dogs for over a decade. MANY communities in the USA are having success working toward no-kill or are achieving no-kill success already. Others have work to do on a more ingrained culture, and I understand that, but that is not reflective of 'overpopulation'.
http://yesbiscuit.blogspot.ca/2009/03/no-kill-movement-and-pet-population.html
One day I hope we can live in a world where shelters don't even have to exist, but until that day we need to deal with reality, and that reality is that there are too many pets, not enough homes. PERIOD.
I linked this earlier, but as some don't like to click links here it is.
"1. How many dogs and cats enter shelters annually? 8 million. (Some put it as low as 6 million, but I am going to use a “worst case” scenario.)
2. Of those how many are savable? 90 percent or just over 7 million.
3. Of those how many will be saved? 4 million.
4. How many of the savable animals are killed? 3 million.
5. How many need to find new homes? If shelters are doing their jobs comprehensively, just over 2 million (3 million on the high end). The remainder should be increased reclaims or in the case of feral cats, TNR’d.
6. Other than those who will adopt from a shelter as a matter of course (those saved above), how many people in the U.S. are looking to bring a new dog or cat into their home next year but have not decided where they will get the animal and can be influenced to adopt from a shelter? 17 million. So, 17 million people for 2-3 million dogs and cats.
7. Has this happened anywhere? Yes, there are many communities which have hit the 90th percentile in save rates.
8. How long did it take them? They did it virtually overnight when new leadership committed to the No Kill philosophy and passionate about saving lives replaced long standing bureaucrats mired in defeatism and excuse making.
9. Are shelters doing all they can to influence those people to adopt from them? This is a rhetorical question. Click here (audio) for an all-too-common experience shared with me by a potential adopter when I was assessing a local shelter.
10. Why don’t they do better? A failure of leadership among the national animal welfare groups such as ASPCA and HSUS, a crisis of uncaring among shelter managers, unfettered discretion to avoid putting in place the programs and services that save lives, and the built in excuse of pet overpopulation."
IF the
issues that cause the death of our pets in shelters continue to be commonly
misidentified then they will not be addressed. Overpopulation is NOT what is getting our pets killed.
Retention is the bigger problem, along with others. High on the list of others is
shelter mismanagement. As long as the focus is on the myth that claims overpopulation is the problem, then retention and shelter mismanagement will not be addressed.
For all dogs to be adopted from shelters ~25% of people looking to acquire a dog need to go to those shelters. Currently many (most) are sourcing pups through dubious breeders and the unscrupulous disguised as rescues as well. We truly do not have ENOUGH caring ethical breeders.
Shelters NEED to be places people WANT to go to get dogs.
Shelters need to take an active role in leading a change in community attitudes toward pet ownership responsibility. Making THAT happen, again, is up to the shelter system.
From a presentation given by Bill Bruce, the AC for Calgary, Alberta, that runs an animal control that is the envy of all of North America (notice especially the comment at 5:25 which addresses overpopulation)
Noted points –
(2:50)". . . Focusing on animal services tonight - a lot about our public education. I give that its own category because it is so important.
(3:19) So what do we at animals services do? We encourage responsible pet ownership. We do that with licensing, with public education, and when it’s necessary, enforcement.
(4:01) Returning pets to owner - core business for me. That’s my number one thing I do is return the pets to owner.
(4:20) How do you go from vision into action? This is really basic business planning 101. The first step is to identify your issues. As human beings we have a real tendency to want to move to solutions right away. Take a step back. Be clear on what the issues are, engage the stakeholders, find out who the stakeholders are . . . . build processes that work. Educate people how to use it.
(5: 25) So because I think we should all be continuous learners, I just learned this last year after having been through literally hundreds of shelters. Uh, in North America, and this is Canada and the US, we don’t really have a problem with overpopulation, stray animals, nuisance or vicious animals. We have got a problem with responsible pet ownership. Virtually every pet I meet in a shelter started out its life in a human relationship. That relationship has failed, the animal ends up in a shelter. So somewhere that responsible pet ownership contract fell apart.
(5:55) When I came into animal control ten years ago . . . the definition of insanity is continuing to do things the same way we always have and thinking we are going to get different results this time – that is what I saw happening up in my jurisdiction with animal control.
(6:25) For us that turning point was really shifting our thinking away from traditional animal control to responsible pet ownership
(6:50) Its not an animal control bylaw, it is a responsible pet ownership bylaw – because its all targeted at the human being and getting them to change their behaviour. . ."
http://btoellner.typepad.com/kcdogblog/2007/09/canine-legisl-2.html
SOB
