In horror, I heard on the news that the RGV no-kill shelter has the goal of turning all RGV shelters into no-kill. I used to be behind the no-kill movement but after seeing what actually happens to the animals once a shelter becomes no-kill I am no longer a believer. Numbers become more important than the actual welfare of the animals.
Rather than no-kill, start giving people true low-cost or free spay and neuter. Start and support trap, neuter or spay and release programs. Start enforcing and prosecuting backyard breeders.
It’s appalling to contemplate, but when shelters give in to pressure to go “no-kill” before they have overcome the breeding and selling of animals in their communities and before establishing sufficient spaying and neutering services, the results are often far worse for animals than a peaceful death through euthanasia. Here’s what happens:
1. Animals are turned away at the shelter door, but they don’t magically vanish. “No-kill” shelters are usually at capacity, so they stop taking in animals, including those in emergency or abusive situations. Instead, unwanted animals are dumped in other neighborhoods or in rural areas left to fend for themselves. This is especially tragic for animals that have always had food but now will die of starvation. They are hit by cars and left to suffer if they don’t die, killed by other animals, become sick and die, slowly suffering, abused and shot at by people, used by dog fighters as bait, etc. There are worse things than humanely being euthanized.
2. Instead of a peaceful death in a caring person’s arms, animals die slowly and in agony on the streets, in backyards, under sheds, on chains, and at the hands of abusive people. I have knowledge of more than one person who took a severely injured or critically ill cat that was suffering horribly and dying to the no-kill shelter in Harlingen asking for humane euthanasia only to be turned away, which resulted in the person watching the cat horribly suffer and slowly die in terrible pain. Nothing Humane about that!
3. Animals spend months or years in cages. Experts agree that after as little as two weeks in a traditional shelter, animals can begin to deteriorate psychologically and become withdrawn, depressed, anxious or aggressive. If adopted, animals that have been confined for extended periods are often repeatedly returned because of behavioral issues — a yo-yo experience that makes them even less adoptable.
4. Animals are cast out and keep on reproducing. To increase “save” rates, some shelters promote animal abandonment. One big sanctuary recently issued a news release urging good Samaritans to leave homeless kittens on the streets, rather than taking them to a shelter. That’s madness: Not only are abandoned kittens in danger of infection, disease, starvation and being hit by cars, attacked by dogs and wildlife, and abused by cruel people, the surviving ones will also eventually go on to reproduce, resulting in even more homeless animals.
5. Animals are handed over to abusers and hoarders. When numbers become the priority, animals are no longer viewed as individuals deserving of consideration and respect but instead as inventory that must be moved, causing shelters to toss aside even basic safeguards. Homeless animals are increasingly being found tortured and killed by adopters who weren’t screened or, even more commonly, caged in hoarders’ filthy basements, garages, sheds and barns. Every day, headlines appear about raids on self-described “rescuers” and the animals — both sick and dead — that were removed from the cruel and disgusting conditions in the homes of the “rescuers.”
We have had incidents like this in CameronCounty. Remember the “rescue” that was pulling animals from the Valley shelters and holding them in horrible conditions in a warehouse outside Los Fresnos? I also know of a hoarding situation that is being constantly dumped on by a no-kill shelter so that shelter can boost its “live outcome” numbers.
No-kill shelters are not the answer! Ask the residents of Harlingen. They just make a bad situation so much worse and it’s the animals that pay for it with their pain and suffering. There are things so much worse than being humanely euthanized.
Theresa Speck lives in Brownsville.
