Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World

“The most potent and cost-effective outreach vehicle is the development of a creative volunteer program. Were shelters to place a high priority on this area through attracting, training, and skillfully utilizing a volunteer outreach corps, they could begin the transition from killing site to a community resource center. A true shelter should be a place where life is affirmed, both in teaching and practice, not a building permeated with the odor of death”  ~Ed Duvin, “In the name of mercy,” 1989

Lexie was killed in Columbus, GA this week despite being friendly and having an adoption committment.

PETA has some advice for communities looking to end the population-control killing of homeless pets:  keep right on killing.

My head hurts.  My heart hurts.  I am not surprised.

Some weeks have a theme.  This week’s theme has been cognitive dissonance, that feeling you get when presented with inconceivably mind-bending scenarios. It can lead to a search for answers, a further exploration and questioning of oneself and the world, to a desire to reshape the world and oneself, or it can lead to a distortion of thought, forcing it to fit where it does not.  What you choose to do with it makes all the difference in the world.

To become a No Kill advocate is to step through the looking glass of animal welfare, into a world where what is is so often the opposite of what is logical, just, and common sense.  Every day is filled with cognitive dissonance.  Killing is kindness.  Nobody wants to kill, yet shelters kill 3-4 million pets every year—half of all they take in.  Shelters kill animals with rescue on the way.  People calling themselves animal lovers make excuses for these things.  Killing healthy and treatable and friendly pets is “euthanasia.”  We call the places that do the killing “shelters.”  Pets are labeled “unwanted,” blaming them for their own killing.  And so on, and so on.

And the organization billing itself as the “largest animal rights organization in the world,” the one known for extremism in advocating against the wearing of fur, the eating of meat, and the testing of cosmetics on animals, the one known for its founder’s statement that “animals are not ours to eat, wear or experiment on,” the one for which no ad campaign in the name of veganism is too tasteless, makes excuses for the killing of homeless pets, advocates the killing of homeless pets, and kills thousands of homeless pets every year.

How do “animal rights” and “needless killing” manage to peacefully coexist within the same organization and within the individuals that comprise it?  The right to live is fundamental to all others.  Without that, there are no other rights.  How are they unable to see the hypocrisy of this, even when it is pointed out to them repeatedly, even when the evidence piles as high as the stack of dead bodies in that infamous walk-in freezer?  How do they recognize the role cognitive dissonance plays in how other people justify what they do to animals, choosing to keep the same old beliefs when confronted with conflicting information, yet can’t see it in themselves?

Up is down and black is white.

The excuses are a slow-moving target, but a moving target nonetheless.  There’s the irresponsible public, which has enjoyed perhaps the longest popularity–over 35 years; pet overpopulation, another classic; and, more recently the notion that animal rescue is often a front for hoarding and dog fighting has been on the ascent, perhaps as the previous two are losing some of their old appeal.  These excuses all have a few things in common—they are false—myths created from gross exaggerations and deliberate misrepresentations, but with small grains of truth that have given them traction.  A minority of pet owners are irresponsible, that is true, and those who work in shelters or rescue will see a disproportionate number of this minority, but that is not why shelters kill.  There are a lot of homeless animals, but that is not the same thing as ‘overpopulation.’  Hoarding and dog fighting exist, but to say that they are epidemic in animal rescue is nothing but a lie concocted to serve a nefarious purpose.

Hoarding is a mental illness, and hoarding of animals is a relatively rare mental illness.  Mental health experts have yet to reach a consensus as to its underlying cause.  Animal hoarding cases receive an increasing amount of media attention because they are so freakish and unusual.  A search of the Pet-Abuse website, a site that tracks all manner of cases of pet abuse, for hoarding cases* with the keyword ‘Georgia’ yielded 12 cases in the entire state in over 10 years.  Of those, two involved rescue—one was a volunteer (but not a foster care volunteer) at a rescue, the other, was the Loonie Farms case.

The state of Georgia, unlike many, requires that animal shelters and rescues be licensed and inspected by the Department of Agriculture.  There are currently over 400 nonprofit rescue groups licensed in Georgia.  Suffice to say, that rescue hoarding is very, very rare.

Shelter killing is commonplace.  A report prepared by the Georgia Voters for Animal Welfare estimates that Georgia’s taxpayer-funded animal control shelters kill 62% of the animals they take in–260,000 dogs and cats every year, so in the past 10 years, Georgia shelters killed upwards of 2.6 million animals. (The overall trend nationwide is that killing is declining, so would likely have been even higher in the years prior to the GVAW report.)  Many thousands of animals die in Georgia shelters for every one that may end up in these bad rescue situations.

And how many dogfighters would want to get a rescue license from the Department of Agriculture and deal with paperwork and inspections so that they could pull animals from shelters when they could steal them or get them from ‘free-to-good homes’ ads?  Clearly these risks are grossly overstated.

Which brings me to a letter sent from PETA to Mayor Teresa Tomlinson of Columbus, GA.  You can read it by clicking here.  Apparently the No kill advocacy going on in Columbus caught PETA’s attention and they wanted to offer the beleaguered mayor some advice that only an organization that kills nearly every animal they get their hands on can.  They hope their letter finds her well.  They always hope their letters find the recipient well.  It’s like they don’t have the social skills or brainpower to come up with a different opening line.

Things have been heating up in Columbus in recent months as a growing number of its citizens become aware of the mismanagement and rampant killing there, and of the fact that there is a better way.  This past week a dog named Lexie was killed despite having an adoption commitment.  Further background on the Columbus situation is available here, here, and here.  The local TV station aired this piece recently, and the public response to it led to another one airing February 22 in which the Mayor cited this letter from PETA as support for her claim that not killing would be harmful to animals.

And this during not just any week, but the very week that PETA’s own kill stats for 2011 were released.  PETA kills the animals it seeks out and takes in to its Bates Motel for pets so-called shelter (they alternately refer to it as a ‘shelter’ or an ‘office building,’ depending on the situation) at a rate of 97%–far worse than all but a handful of Georgia animal controls.  This is despite, or perhaps because of its budget of over $30 million.  Bill yourself as a champion of rights, build a relentless publicity machine, and you too can get away with murder.

In 2011, PETA took in 2029 animals (mostly dogs and cats, and some “other” animals such as rabbits) “for purpose of adoption.”  They killed 1965 of them.  Only 28 were adopted and 11 reclaimed. PETA transferred 34 to kill shelters, where they may or may not have been adopted and other animals may or may not have been killed to make room for them.  PETA’s adoption rate in 2011 was 1.4%.  One-point-four percent. 97% went on to occupy the walk-in freezer in PETA’s headquarters.  Keep in mind that over 90% of pets entering shelters are healthy or treatable, and there is no evidence that the pets taken in and killed by PETA are any different.  PETA has been consistently unable to produce evidence otherwise, even when pointedly asked.

PETA would prefer that the status quo continue.  Though they apparently aren’t aware that rescues are licensed and inspected in GA, they disparage concerned citizens, animal rescuers and  No Kill advocates (some of whom are or have been shelter directors themselves) as “individuals and groups unfamiliar with the inner workings of animal care and control facilities (or the daily challenges and heartbreaks that shelter workers face).”  Really?  What is it about these “inner workings” that cannot be understood by ordinary people not inducted into the mysteries?  They don’t explain that but present a collection of straw men, falsehoods and a couple of articles, one of them poorly written fear mongering about hoarding, the other one they apparently didn’t read very carefully.  It concludes with the story of how Best Friends, perhaps the best-known no-kill animal sanctuary in the country, and host of the annual No More Homeless Pets Conference, orchestrated rescue and adoption for the hundreds of feline victims of the FLOCK hoarding case in Pahrump, NV.

They cite cases where No Kill has not succeeded, but fail to mention that none of those were following the No Kill Equation, the only proven method for ending population control killing in open-admission shelters.  They ignore the growing list of communities where No Kill is succeeding—28 as of this writing.  They ignore that we have known that it can be done for almost 11 years.

The letter is signed by Jennifer Brown, who notes that she can be reached at (630)966-8895 or JenniferB@peta.org.

On one side we have the product of the nation’s oldest animal welfare organization, the ASPCA’s Tactics of the Extremist Agenda, and on the other the product of an organization over 100 years younger, one that prides itself on being seen as extremist in the name of animal rights, yet which kills and rehashes excuses for killing that mostly date from before it was founded.  PETA has nothing of substance to offer.  It is weak, derivative and backward, trading off the false image it has crafted.

Why would anyone want to take advice (and say so on TV!) on animal sheltering from an organization, which, despite a budget of over $30 million, has an even worse kill rate than all but a very few in Georgia?  Why align oneself with an organization that is unpopular with those who don’t care about animals and is doubly so with informed people who care about homeless pets?  Why do so while claiming to be “the most progressive”?  That is not a winning situation no matter how you look at it.

PETA uses lies to try to prevent a bill that would clarify that TNR, the most humane and effective way of managing feral cat populations, is not prohibited in Virginia.

Ed Duvin, who sparked the No Kill movement with his 1989 essay “In the Name of Mercy,” could have been rebutting PETA’s campaign against the No Kill movement in general, and against Virginia’s S.B 359 in particular when he wrote “Speciesism:  Alive and Well”.  Heck, I hope this finds them well:

“Instead of recognizing our movement’s historical and contemporary role in this holocaust, many leaders continue to rationalize it on the basis of a “humane” death being preferable to a “miserable” life – further arguing that we are best able to provide this “merciful” end. Desperate humans are grievously suffering by the tens of millions all over the world, but who can imagine relief agencies endorsing systematic euthanasia as an acceptable policy. A vastly different ethic applies for companion animals, however, and most of our movement remains silent.”

And:

“Deciding that death for other beings is preferable to a risk-filled life is not euthanasia in its traditional form, but rather a lethal manifestation of speciesism that projects our own fears and values onto another species, and then proclaims – as though we were omniscient gods – that death is our loving “gift” to them.”

And:

“A recent issue of the leading shelter publication spared no effort in denigrating progressive programs to support feral cats. The thrust of this dogmatic criticism was that euthanasia is preferable to neuter-and release programs, claiming such programs expose ferals to the risk of “terrifying lives and tragic deaths.” Here again, we see the “kill, kill, kill” mentality – arrogantly presuming that certain death is a kinder fate for ferals than uncertain life. How ironic, as Thoreau pointed out, that the most desperate lives are lived quietly by humans, and yet no one is euthanizing us for our own protection!”

And:

“During the past few years, I have witnessed more anger from the Shelter Establishment directed at critics than the grotesque slaughter, and this sorrowful lack of priority and proportion is indicative of a malignancy in the soul of our movement.”

The thing is, he wrote that back in 1990.  It’s 2012 and they still don’t get it.

If you are from Virginia, please join Alley Cat Allies, No Kill advocates, and some of the best-performing shelters in the country in voicing your support for S.B. 359, which clarifies that TNR is not prohibited in Virginia by clicking here.

Ernest says, "If the ASPCA wants to be my voice, they're going to have to do a hell of a lot better than this."

Early last Thursday morning, I published  an open letter to Mary Jo White, Chair of the ASPCA Board of Directors, and emailed a copy to her at her law office.  Earlier this afternoon (its Tuesday), I received a reply, not from her, but from the ASPCA Public Information Office.

A form letter.  How rude.  How disappointing.  How unsurprising.  How typical.

I would like to note that although in my original letter, I had specifically requested that my intelligence not be insulted, they went ahead and did it anyway.  Notably absent from this form letter are any links to the full text of the Amy Paulin/ASPCA Quick Kill Bill (the A5449 that the ASPCA is touting below) or to the Kellner CAARA Bill.  That is because anyone of normal intelligence would be able to see that the ASPCA’s bill is comprised of nothing but loopholes allowing the continuation of the status quo, while the Kellner bill would result in genuine reform.

The letter appears to assume that the recipient is some sort of  babe in the woods–utterly uninformed and lacking in even the most basic critical thinking skills.  Perhaps this is who the ASPCA’s Public Information Office is accustomed to writing for–the superficial check-writer who will believe anything she is told as long as it contributes to her desired self-image as an animal-lover.  That ain’t me, as I explained pretty clearly in the letter that got this rot for a reply:

Dear Friend of Animals:

Thank you so much for your interest in the ASPCA.  The ASPCA has always encouraged open dialogue and the thoughtful exchange of ideas, and I appreciate your contacting us with your concerns regarding the shelter access legislation in New York. There is a lot of information circulating on this bill so allow me to explain what it does and does not do.

The ASPCA applauds efforts to foster cooperation and to save lives through shelter-rescue partnerships.  We support shelter access legislation crafted to accomplish the twin goals of saving lives and preventing suffering caused by hoarding, cruelty and neglect, and animal fighting. We think that A. 5449-A and S. 5433-A strike a good balance by instituting some positive procedures to help lost pets find their way home, enhancing shelter care for animals, fostering collaboration between shelters and rescue organizations, and ensuring that animals are not placed in harm’s way by incorporating necessary safeguards to prevent animal suffering.

Here are some of the advances A. 5449-A and S. 5433-A make that will save lives:

1) Establishes new procedures to help ensure that lost animals are reunited with their owners;

2) Requires appropriate vaccinations and emergency care to prevent pain and suffering for animals brought into shelters;

3) Prevents euthanasia if an appropriate rescue option is available;

4) Requires every shelter to establish a list of rescues to notify prior to euthanasia to ensure that as many animals are provided rescue as possible;

5) Strikes current law allowing euthanasia if an animal is “unfit for any useful purpose” and instead requires that the animal be suffering incurably; and

6) Includes safeguards that would help prevent animal fighters or hoarders from being able to pose as a rescue organization, thereby avoiding sending animals to situations that would experience intense suffering and death.

Criticisms of this legislation have been generated by individuals who support a different, competing bill that would require that shelters hand over animals to organizations without the shelter having authority to inspect the facility where animals are taken to ensure their health and well-being. While we support the broader goal of saving as many lives as possible, we believe it must be done with protections that ensure animals are not put at risk and placed in situations where they will experience tremendous suffering. That is why we have determined that A. 5449-A and S. 5433-A is the best way to instigate cooperation and rescue work without jeopardizing our homeless and lost animals.  There has been confusion regarding some of the language in this bill and we are actively working with Assemblywoman Paulin to make amendments.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me again.  Thank you for being an animal welfare advocate and for all you do to help.

Sincerely,

ASPCA Public Information

P: (888) 288-0028

www.aspca.org

The information contained in this e-mail, and any attachments hereto, is from The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals® (ASPCA®) and is intended only for use by the addressee(s) named herein and may contain legally privileged and/or confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution, copying or use of the contents of this e-mail, and any attachments hereto, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please immediately notify me by reply email and permanently delete the original and any copy of this e-mail and any printout thereof.

The ASPCA's reply to my appeal to Mary Jo White, their Board Chair to do the right thing. Click to enlarge.

Dear Ms. White,

I am writing to you as a longtime observer and critic of the ASPCA who would like nothing better than for the ASPCA to become an organization  that I could wholeheartedly support.  I love animals and all of my pets are rescues.  Almost all of them are refugees of our nation’s broken animal sheltering system, rescued from, rather than by the shelters that are supposed to be their safety net.  The fact that animals have to be rescued from shelters which are not places of safety but are places of abuse and killing is the irony at the heart of why I cannot support the ASPCA, an organization which claims to be on the side of animals, and was founded to be on the side of animals, but which is instead fighting to maintain the deplorable status quo in NYCACC and “shelters” across the country, and fighting against No Kill shelter reform in Austin, TX and elsewhere (thankfully FixAustin and Austin Pets Alive! won that round).  Tragic irony is the way of the warped world of animal sheltering.  (I almost said “way of life,” but that would have been utterly inappropriate.)

Your ad campaigns are ubiquitous.  When I was sitting down to write this, I found that articles I’d written critical of the ASPCA and articles I’d written about situations which illustrate the need for shelter reform and genuine shelter access legislation had ASPCA ads on them.  One had a total of four ASPCA ads, and it was specifically about the ASPCA’s opposition to shelter reform and access legislation!  No wonder people are so confused and continue to send you enormous amounts of money even as you fail to clean up the mess you helped create in your own backyard and even as you promote legislation like the Quick Kill Bill (sponsored by Assemblywoman Amy Paulin) and oppose legislation  like CAARA (sponsored by Assemblyman Micah Kellner), which would save animal lives and go a long way to advancing the humane treatment of  animal rescuers by guaranteeing them the right to rescue even when they speak out about abuses that they witness.

Ad placement FAIL!

Do not try to tell me that the Paulin bill is wonderful for animals or that the Kellner bill is inadequate.  Nonsense!  I have the unfair advantage of having actually read them both.  I will not be fooled, only further irritated by any such attempts to insult my intelligence, and I’m already pretty ticked off.

I used to live near the ASPCA’s home turf of New York City, and I’ve known the ugly reality hidden behind the cute calendars for many years—since the early-mid 1980s, to be more precise, when the ASPCA ran animal control for NYC, and when I first heard the below parable of the accountant and the veterinarian, which I recounted in a previous article about the ASPCA’s opposition to Oreo’s Law.  It was quite the chamber of horrors back then, worse even than NYCACC is now.  (I’m always perplexed by people who, upon finding out the truth about the ASPCA, think that it has very recently strayed, like in the past few years.  Not so.  It’s just that more people are becoming aware of it)

The ASPCA has long been a nice comfortable killing machine.  It’s really quite amazing how times have changed and not changed…

An accountant was visiting his client, a veterinarian who worked for the ASPCA in addition to his private practice. In fact, he seemed to spend a lot more hours at the ASPCA than he devoted to his private practice, even though they weren’t paying him all that much. The accountant was at the vet’s office wrestling the books into some semblance of order and a very friendly dog with a badly scarred and misshapen head came galumphing over to be petted, and the accountant obliged him. The dog was friendly to the point of making a pest of himself by attempting to be an oversized lap dog. The accountant shooed him away so that he could get some work done. He could hear the clop-clop of the dog’s paws on the floor as he went down the hall, around a corner, and back up another hall to reappear at the opposite door of the office he was working in, with a look on his scarred face that said “Hi, I’m a different dog than the one that was just here a minute ago, pet me too”.

The dog had come to reside temporarily at the vet’s office as a result of the vet’s work for the ASPCA. He’d come in as a badly injured stray. Someone had apparently beaten him and he had multiple fractures to his skull, which the vet, who is well-respected for his considerable skills as a surgeon, had spent hours in surgery wiring back together. He practically donated some very fancy surgery to them because that’s the kind of person he is. They wanted to kill the dog after all that–”a friendly dog who wouldn’t win any beauty contests”, as the accountant described him. The vet removed the dog from their custody instead. The accountant told the vet that while he admired the work he did on behalf of this dog and other animals at the ASPCA, it was his responsibility as accountant to advise him to leave the ASPCA and concentrate on his private practice, and frankly, he couldn’t understand why he took that kind of abuse from them, and for so little money. The vet’s reply was impossible to argue with: 

“The animals need me.”

One protector in the killing machine was better than nothing at all. I can’t imagine how he did it for as long as he did. The tradition of killing animals for being there and abusing those who would do otherwise is a long one there. I am perpetually amazed at people who see it as a benevolent place. Apparently their marketing has done its job, but it would take a lot more than some nice packaging to remove the image of that dog my father described so vividly and what the ASPCA wanted to do to him, and to the vet.

I hadn’t thought of that dog in years, but recent events have made him restless. He’s been making his circuit down the hall, around the corner, and up the other hall, to reappear at the opposite door. Always the same question:

“Will it be different this time?”

When will it ever be different?

Years later, in 2000-2001, I had the excruciatingly painful experience of volunteering at a shelter and fostering a litter of kittens in my home for a month.  They were healthy and delightful little kittens and I did what I was told, returned them to the shelter when they were old enough for adoption.  The shelter reneged on its promise to call me if they were in danger of being killed for any reason and instead killed two of them when I had made it clear that I was only a phone call away.  Boy, was I naive! There wasn’t even any call.  Those two adorable little kittens were instead injected with poison and thrown in the trash as if their lives truly did not matter and I was treated like trash, my efforts, my ideas, my feelings, my personhood of no consequence to people for whom making a phone call was a greater inconvenience than killing two little kittens.  Its not like I was anonymous to them either, I was at the shelter volunteering every week.  Did they think I would take that lying down or that I wouldn’t find out?  Or perhaps, more chillingly, did killing kittens with a human attachment, and to someone they saw every week, have an added measure of attraction?  All of these scenarios are possible, and all of them happen in shelters.  Thankfully, the volunteers at the Tompkins County SPCA rebelled against the status quo.  We looked at each other and realized that we were not alone.  We stood up for the animals and we stood up for ourselves.  The animals deserved to live and we deserved to be treated like human beings.  Less than a year after my kittens were so needlessly killed, Tompkins County made history by ending its killing of healthy and treatable pets and becoming the first No Kill community in the country.  To this day, it remains the only one in New York State.

The ASPCA wasn't there, but their ads sure are everywhere!

What the heck are you people doing with that $140 million that you raise every year?

I wrote about that experience and received many comments and emails that went like this:

I run a rescue group. My local shelter killed animals I specifically called and said I was on my way to pick up. Why? Because like you, I complained about the shelter publicly. I tried to work with them, but my concerns were ignored. They said I was unreasonable because I thought dogs should have access to clean water. I am so sick of people saying shelters have no choice but to kill, that they work hard, that they care so much. Tell it to the two dogs I was on my way to save when they thought they would teach me a lesson by killing them. I will never forget the look on the staff’s face when I arrived. They were smiling and smirking. As soon as I saw them, I knew something was terribly wrong. I just could not imagine that it was that. I’ve not been back since then.

Have you ever thought for a minute what it is like for someone to have an animal they had offered to rescue killed to spite them or because of rampant incompetence?  Have you ever thought about what it is like to have that agony compounded by the knowledge that huge, enormously wealthy organizations not only won’t go to bat for you and the animals you’re trying to save, but that they’ll label you ‘divisive’ or an ‘extremist’ for speaking out about it, that they’ll instead back those who kill animals out of spite and incompetence, even going so far as to enshrine this sort of abuse in legislation?  Spend a few minutes trying to put yourself in the shoes of animal advocates and rescuers.  If you have a pet, hold them on your lap. Picture them being killed in a shelter while you were on your way to pick them up.  How would that make you feel?  How would you feel if you were then called names by your pet’s killers?  What would you do next?  Would you be able to continue rescuing, knowing that this could happen again and again?

Will the A actually do something to prevent tragedies like this from happening in NYS? I sure hope so for the sake of animals and rescuers in NYS, and in GA.

Why on earth should this be allowed?  Why on earth is one of the largest and wealthiest animal organizations on earth trying to pass legislation that would ensure that it continues happening, to block legislation that would make it illegal, and to fight grassroots reform efforts?

Unlike the animals in shelters, and unlike those of us who have experienced firsthand the need for CAARA and other genuine shelter access and reform legislation,   you are in a position that affords you tremendous leverage.  You are Chair of the Board of one of the largest and wealthiest animal organizations in the world.  You could literally turn the world around for the 3-4 million animals who die annually in America’s shelters because what you decide to do right here, right now in New York State will set a precedent for every shelter and every legislature in the country.  You could save so many animal rescuers from the torment they face every day without laws protecting their right to rescue.  You could make a huge positive difference in the lives of shelter employees.  You could spare untold numbers of pet owners the agony of having their pet killed in a shelter before they could get there to pick them up.

Will the A act to end rampant killing in NYS? It would make it easier to do the same in GA and we need all the help we can get. Dead kitties don't make such good valentines.

You have the power to hold your CEO, Ed Sayres accountable for actually protecting animals and animal rescuers for the first time in his life.  You can order him to withdraw ASPCA support for A5449, the Quick Kill Bill and to join the No Kill Advocacy Center, Alley Cat Allies, Best Friends Animal Society, No Kill Nation, and thousands of private citizens in support of  CAARA instead.

You have the power to fire him.

You have the power to hire someone who would make Henry Bergh proud.

You have the power to make it different this time.  You have the responsibility to make it different this time.

I, and many others will rejoice if you do.  We’ll keep fighting if you fail to.

Sincerely,

Valerie Hayes

P.S. I said that almost all of my pets were refugees from the broken animal sheltering system.  Ernest had the good fortune to arrive at the Tompkins County SPCA in August 2001.  She was only 10 days old.  (What can I say? kittens are hard to sex at that age!) She arrived at a shelter that was truly a shelter for her, a place where she and her mother and litter mates were guaranteed continued life and the foster care placement that they needed.  Had she arrived at the shelter just two months earlier, prior to June 11, 2001, her story would very likely have ended in much the same way as those two little kittens I’d fostered only to have the shelter turn around and kill them–luckless, betrayed and dead in a trash bag.

I thought I’d built up an immunity to cuteness, but the charms of the little runt kitten with the Don King hairdo proved too much for me, and I ended up adopting her.  We were both very lucky.  She had a shelter that was truly a shelter when she needed it most.  So many are not so fortunate.  They are the voiceless, the ghosts that haunt the animal welfare movement, the unseen, unsaved millions.

Ernest as a kitten

Ernest

Ernest at the window

Which is more humane, crate training or killing and dumping? Which is more consistent with the concept of animal rights?

Ten out of ten pets surveyed indicated that they would prefer crate training to a ride in the PETA death van. Ten out of ten pets surveyed would prefer eating treats bought at the Piggly Wiggly over being thrown dead into the dumpster behind the Piggly Wiggly.

Apparently, opposing No Kill shelter reforms isn’t crazy enough for them, the wingnuts at PETA also find it necessary to show how little they know about the care of pets that are actually, you know, still breathing, that they are campaigning against the use of crates.  Above is an actual PETA ad that has been edited for truthfulness.

A map showing the locations of communities saving at least 90% of the homeless pets entering their shelters. Click to enlarge.

Remember the wonderful positive energy and message expressed in the “Take a Chance on Me” video form the SPCA of Wake County a while back? Although it has since been pulled due to objections from the record company, it showed that an animal shelter could be a place of joy if it was committed to lifesaving. By contrast, a ‘shelter’ that squanders the lives of animals squanders the hearts and goodwill of volunteers. It’s either win-win or lose-lose. Two shelters in the same county, worlds apart.

Back in August, Mike Fry of Animal Ark in Minnesota wrote an article entitled “A Tale of Four Cities” that began:

Geographically, they are widely distributed. Demographically, they have little in common. Yet this strange collection of communities have something very much in common: The old-school “catch and kill” style animal shelters in them are experiencing tremendous upheaval, brought about by a growing and passionate group of no kill advocates.

Perhaps more important is the fact that the dramatic shifts currently underway in Miami-Dade County, Florida; Harris County (Houston), Texas and the twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota come on the heels of seismic shifts that have occurred in other communities, like Austin, Texas; Washoe County (Reno), Nevada and others. Collectively, the tales unfolding in these communities prove that the no kill movement is continuing to gain in strength and momentum, and could likely bring about the most important shift within the animal welfare movement ever.

Four “shelters,” far apart, yet with much in common.

Almost ten years ago, when it finally began to sink in that we were really saving all the healthy and treatable pets in Tompkins County, really, actually doing it, I began to think that the logical next thing would be that Tompkins would send ripples locally, that adjacent counties would see what we were accomplishing and would do it too, and that pebble tossed in the water, that Big Bang,  would send out ever-widening circles, extending compassion and continued life to homeless pets as it went.  I was wrong, and there is still only one No Kill community in the state of New York.*

It seemed to make logical sense, so why didn’t it happen?   Why didn’t the spread of No Kill communities follow Waldo Tobler’s First Law of Geography?

Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.

I’ve been wondering about this for a while.  Early in the movement, the No Kill philosophy didn’t travel to nearby communities so much as it leapfrogged across great distances.  It spread, not by diffusion, but by jump dispersal, to put it in the terms of biogeography.  Like windblown seeds, like birds caught in a storm, this extraordinary idea—that we could save them all, that we could leave killing in the dark and distant past—floated hundreds or even thousands of miles, to be taken up by one extraordinary person after another who would work for it, who would fight for it.  It’s a tough little idea with the ability to fly.  It has to be to survive the onslaught it still faces wherever it goes.  Like life itself, it is not easy, but full of inspiration.

It is people, not proximity.  People who are at once ordinary and extraordinary.

No Kill is an idea, and thanks to the internet, ideas can leap across continents in an instant.  More and more people are ‘getting it’.  It is as simple as the Golden Rule–even young children can understand it, yet the current killing paradigm is ensconced in such a morass of excuses, lies and obfuscations that it persists, at least for now.  No Kill communities aren’t correlated with economics—why are wealthy communities not already No Kill whereas less well-to-do ones are? It takes a decision and hard work, often in the form of a fight.

Every No Kill community was once a killing one.  Every single one looked impossible until it was done.  They didn’t “try” for years, they made a decision, and they carried it out immediately.

The No Kill movement has recently begun getting some of the national-level, mainstream press coverage that it deserves, and I expect we’ll see more and more of it in 2012 as we continue to gain traction.  That little document-leaking episode last month was the sputtering of a faltering regime.  I just hope that they read the writing on the wall–that Extremist Agenda graffiti that says we can save 90+% of all animals entering open-admission municipal animal control facilities—and get with the program sooner, rather than later.

Last week, Forbes magazine gave it this mention:

Most people assume that the ASPCA, one of the largest and most well-funded animal-rights groups in the world, who profess to prevent cruelty to animals, would be all for advocating that homeless cats and dogs not be killed at animal shelters. Not so. A big eye opener: The ASPCA has actively fought to prevent cities from establishing no-kill shelters and aggressively fights bills proposed in local city councils that aim to reduce the number of innocent animals being killed. Another shocker? PETA, does too. The true protectors of animals are not the bureaucracy-rich animal rights organizations, but smaller groups and individuals. Nathan Winograd, author of Redemption, and Stanford-law-educated ex-criminal prosecutor and corporate attorney, is the founder of a growing no-kill-shelter movement—and gets my vote for most important intellectual this year. His no-kill actions challenge the status quo by thinking beyond the box. He’s developed a creative and realistic plan that many cities are successfully using to save most of their homeless animals. New York City’s ACC, who murders hundreds of cats and dogs each week needs to reform and implement his ideas.

And, presumably, the checkbooks of a wealthy animal-lover or two accustomed to donating to the ASPCA or PETA, were slammed shut.   Money talks.

A couple of months ago, the Christian Science Monitor profiled Ryan Clinton and the work of Fix Austin and Austin Pets Alive! in making Austin the nation’s largest No Kill community.  It mentioned how they recently formed American Pets Alive! to support grassroots No Kill efforts elsewhere and quoted Clinton, “I really think we are at the tipping point nationally and this is going to happen all over the country very quickly.”

We’ve gone from exactly one No Kill community ten years ago to over 25 now, with several communities poised to join the “90% Club” and many more reform efforts underway.  Still, that amounts to less than 1% of the estimated 3500 animal shelters in the country.  It may not seem like much, but the number is increasing at an increasing rate–most of these were announced within the past year or so.  No Kill Houston and the No Kill Communities blog have been keeping lists of these communities as they pop up, but a visual representation helps to put things in a spatial context.  Cathy Habas of No Kill Louisville put No Kill communities on the map –literally, a Google Map, and that gives us another way of looking at where we are and where we’re going.    There’s a lot of blank space in the Southwest, Southeast, New England, Alaska and the Hawaiian Islands, but there’s a nice cluster developing in and around Virginia and some interesting things happening in Texas.   How impossible can it be if it is all over the map?

If we’re at the tipping point, and it looks like we may well be, then this map and the landscape of animal sheltering in this country will be looking very different very soon, but this isn’t a passive process–it doesn’t just happen by diffusion.  Not yet, and maybe not ever.  It happens by jump dispersal.

A determined leap.

A decision.

A marker is something to celebrate.  A blank space is an opportunity.

*New York City has been “trying” to go No Kill for years, missing deadline after deadline.  If the ASPCA were to throw its considerable heft behind making New York City No Kill and ending the rampant abuses at NYCACC, rather than blocking No Kill efforts there and elsewhere, the Big Apple would be the biggest No Kill community in the country tomorrow.

UPDATE  12/20/11 From Cathy Habas:  “The “Map of No Kill” just got more impressive. Because it was shared extensively yesterday (600 views in a day! Wow!) I’ve gotten some feedback regarding even more No Kill communities! Seagoville, TX; Brown County, IN; Chippewa County, MI; Allegany County, MD; Ivins, UT; and Vancouver, BC all joined the map.”

UPDATE 12/21/11 Healdsburg, CA joins the map with a 93% save rate in 2010 and a 95% save rate in 2011, bringing the current number of No Kill communities in North America to 34!  Still think it’s impossible?

Click here to see the updated map.