Disillusionment
There was a recent rescue operation by the shelter I volunteer for which seized 120 cats from a 50' trailer where a couple was hoarding them. It was right about the same time that I returned Gabriel and I thought my inbox was about to get flooded with requests for foster.
The emails never came, which puzzled me until I received this in my mailbox:
http://www.animalhumanesociety.org/node/516
They killed them all. Every one.
I was looking for news articles about it and found this from several months ago:
http://www.citypages.com/2008-08-20/news/minnesotas-largest-shelter-killed-more-than-14000-animals-last-year/
Now I'm just kind of struggling with all this.
They propagandized me when I first signed up about how no-kill shelters were really just maintaining a sense of self-righteousness by turning animals away and leaving the dirty work to the Humane Society. They portrayed themselves as having open arms to every animal and taking on the responsibility of making the tough calls and maximizing benefit to all animals.
I was aware that they were very dodgy about any statistics regarding how many had to be euthanized and I gave them the benefit of the doubt because really, any number you put in that box is going to upset people. Now I know. Last year 48% of the cats brought to the shelter were euthanized.
This specific case of the recently "rescued" cats is just sickening. They have a network of 5 locations and it's the slow season. I find it hard to believe that some accomodation couldn't be made. Even if they had to redistribute the cats in one location to empty it out completely so the sick cats were all in one place where they could contain the infectious diseases and get to work sorting them out, even if 50% of them were too sick to go to adoption...I just can't think of any possible excuse to just kill them all.
They were offered help from other shelters and the public but apparently it was too late, they were already dead. That tells me they didn't do any serious vetting at all, they just said "This is a mess, let's just kill them."
I walked the adoption floor when Gabriel was getting his stitches out and they were at less than half capacity. (I broke my personal rule not to check up on my fosterlings after they leave my care. I saw his picture on the website so I know he made it to the adoption floor and a couple days later he was gone. I have every reason to believe he got out of there alive.)
They also are reported to be in the top 1% of shelters in terms of financial assets. In shelter terms, they are filthy rich. Not only that, but the story got enough press that it would presumably lead to a spike in donations and they could have made an appeal for more funds by citing these 120 cats and their ill-health. They are so careful to spin their activities in the best possible light, it mystifies me that they didn't save any at all. It's the worst PR ever.
Which makes me swing back the other way. If they had even saved a dozen, they could have deflected the bad PR on to the hoarders so why make such a sweeping death sentence when it was against their best interests? Is that evidence that the euthanizing really had to be done?
The hoarders are over the edge. By refusing to give up any of the cats and continuing to hoard more, in some sense they killed the cats with compassion. There is an argument to be made that bringing the cats into the shelter would also be killing with compassion because of the risk of spreading the diseases. So how much compassion is appropriate? I would have trusted the Humane Society to make that distinction but now I don't know.
I'm getting the troubling sense that they are so rich that they are less inclined to struggle.
The guy from the no-kill shelter who has been most vocal in eviscerating the Humane Society is probably the self-righteous flip side to the coin and I don't want to contribute to his smugness by switching alliances to his organization but I think I need to look into other shelters and see if there is somewhere I can volunteer with less soul-searching struggle.