Before Redemption was released, I realized that the book would result in attempts to assassinate my character. This week I spent 90 minutes on the telephone with a reporter from Houston who asked me a lot of questions around my integrity and character. The line of questioning was based on the rumor and innuendo of No Kill detractors like Pat Dunaway in order to undermine my efforts and maintain a policy of killing in our shelters. No lie is too grand and no contradiction too obvious for them. Accordingly, it was suggested that I am in league with puppy millers but I am also an animal rights extremist intent on making it illegal to have pets. How can I be both? Especially when I am neither.
Ironically, while they claim that I am an “animal rights extremist,” their policies and tactics are most closely aligned with PETA’s, which also advances an agenda of needless killing, and does so by lying about me as they did in a recent letter to the editor of the Houston Chronicle. In that letter, they accused me of causing warehousing in a shelter I not only have never worked for or with, but one I have been a vocal critic of for many years, including blasting it for kill oriented policies in my book.
Claims include that I receive money from breeders and the Center for Consumer Freedom (I have not), but also that I ordered my animal control officers to raid a breeder when I was in Tompkins County because I don’t like breeders. I was then accused of firing the animal control officers because they refused to say it was a terrible facility. Again, am I for breeders? Or against breeders?
It was suggested that I left Tompkins in financial ruin, even though I finished my last year with an operational surplus (and nearly $1 million in the bank). However, in 2008, the new director of the Tompkins County SPCA (the third since my departure) asked the towns to increase their funding for legally mandated animal control from $1.65 per capita to $3.00 per capita. Several of the towns refused, despite the fact that surrounding communities were paying an average of $5.00 per capita for kill shelters. For less than that, the Tompkins County SPCA was offering No Kill animal control (the towns would pay the costs of the animal control program which they are legally required to do, and the SPCA would subsidize any additional costs).
If this was any other shelter, these people would have rallied around it, because $3.00 per capita was less than half of the high end of the $5.00 to $7.00 HSUS recommends for shelters. But because it is a symbol for No Kill, they attack it as financially unsustainable, an unfair and deceitful double standard.
I debunked all the lies and contradictions with the reporter and I am hopeful that message will carry the day. I then suggested he speak to shelter directors who are succeeding: Suzanne Kogut in Charlottesville, Bonney Brown in Reno, Abigail Smith in Tompkins. I hope he does.
But just the asking is enough to cast a cloud of guilt and just the raising of the issues muddies the waters which would allow government bureaucrats to use that as an excuse to continue killing. I hope the animals of Houston aren’t sacrificed to this type of politics of personal destruction.
And so I sent the following plea to the reporter:
We talked more about attacks and rumors about my character than about what it takes to reduce killing, and that makes me a bit wary. My whole life has been dedicated to ending the killing of animals, and in the process, I’ve come to realize, as have many others, that often it is bureaucratic inertia and politics or even lack of caring that keeps animal care poor and killing high. It’s also the thinking that they are “just animals.” I can’t imagine a human hospital keeping a doctor whose license was suspended in another state for substandard care, but this is the status quo in sheltering, and it appears to be happening in Houston with their veterinarian (if the allegations reported in the [Houston] Chronicle are true). Given your questioning, which I accept as you doing your job, all I ask is that “controversy” and “shock value” don’t replace fundamental fairness. It’s not fair to me and it is not fair to the animals.
There are far too many animals being killed, and I would hate this to sidetrack about whether reducing the killing is a good idea or not a good idea. Even the Humane Society of the United States could no longer argue with the facts and in language that was excitingly similar to statements throughout my book, in late 2008 they stated that the public does care and is not to blame for their killing, that killing animals in shelters is “needless,” that we can be a No Kill nation today, and that “pet overpopulation” is more myth than fact. According to HSUS, “By increasing the percentage of people who obtain their pets through adoption-by just a few percentage points-we can solve the problem of euthanasia of healthy and treatable dogs and cats.” They also stated that:
* “The needless loss of life in animal shelters is deplored by the American public. People deeply love their dogs and cats and feel that killing pets who are homeless through no fault of their own is a problem we must work harder to prevent. They want animals to have a second chance at life, not death by injection.”
* “The needless killing of pets by animal shelters and animal control agencies comes at an enormous economic and moral cost.”
This comes after announcing that staunch No Kill advocates Suzanne Kogut and Bonney Brown will be speaking at Expo 2009, HSUS’ animal sheltering conference. Kogut runs an open admission No Kill animal control shelter, while Brown has led a No Kill initiative now saving 90% of dogs and 83% of all cats in Washoe County, Nevada.
It is not pet overpopulation if kittens are being killed in shelters because the shelter refuses to put in place a foster care program which would eliminate the “need” to kill kittens, as too many shelters in this country do. It is the lack of that program which is causing the kittens to be killed. It is not pet overpopulation if Pit Bull-type dogs are being killed because the shelter kills dogs based on arbitrary criteria, such as perception of what breed a dog is, even if the individual dogs are healthy and friendly. It is the arbitrary policy that is killing those dogs. Just like it is not pet overpopulation if feral cats are killed, or puppies, or shy animals or any of the other categories of shelter animals which can be saved with a targeted program to save their lives, which shelters simply refuse to implement, even as implementation will provide a lifesaving alternative to systematic killing. The reality is that short of leaving them alone or outlawing their trapping, you cannot save feral cats in shelters without a Trap-Neuter-Release (TNR) program, just like you cannot save kittens or puppies without a foster care program. This is why opposition to No Kill is a non-starter. How do you save animals without these programs? You can’t. But while any level of lifesaving is not possible without these programs, No Kill is precluded unless they are comprehensively implemented to the point that they replace killing entirely.
But let’s assume for the moment that you can never reach No Kill. Today, shelters nationally are killing roughly half or more of all incoming animals. If I can borrow from an overused sports analogy, that puts us at the 50-yard line. And although the evidence is fairly overwhelming to the contrary, let’s say that we can never cross the goal line because of “pet overpopulation.” What is wrong with getting to the 20 yard line or 10 yard line? If all shelters put in place the programs and services of the No Kill Equation, the model which brought rates of shelter killing in communities from San Francisco, CA to Ithaca, NY; from Reno, NV to Charlottesville VA, and points in between to all time lows, we can save millions of lives nationally, regardless of whether we ever achieve a No Kill nation. Even if people do not believe that a No Kill nation is inevitable as I do, that is worth doing and worth doing without delay. Because every year we delay, indeed every day we delay, the body count increases.
But more than that, even if we were to accept as fact that there is no practical way out of killing, that doesn’t make killing animals either ethical, merciful, or defensible. Animal lovers would still be morally bound to reject it. Any “practical” or utilitarian consideration about killing cannot hold sway over an animal’s right to his or her very life. Just as other social movements reject what is claimed to be practical when it violates the rights of individuals, we too should reject the idea that killing animals is acceptable because of the claim-even if one were to accept it as fact-that there are “too many” for the “too few homes which are available.”