I have talked about this in previous blogs but we need to keep hearing it until we understand this. Our dogs and cats cannot speak for themselves and therefore are unable to let everyone know how badly we are failing them with the current sheltering model. We are their voices and must demand better for them.
Below is an article that came out today, December 28, 2023. Another voice standing up to Managed Intake (aka No Kill). Are you ready to be their voice too?
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The Verdict Is In: ‘No-Kill’ Is Failing Animals and Communities
In this new article by novelist Jonathan Franzen, which just came out in The New Yorker and is lifting the veil on how “no-kill” policies at animal shelters—even public shelters that are funded by taxpayer dollars—are causing cats and dogs to suffer.As Franzen explains, many shelters are prioritizing “save rates” over “spay rates”—they’re focused on keeping animals out of their euthanasia statistics even if it means animals die badly out on the streets, but many of them are not doing nearly enough—if anything—to prevent animals from being born into a world already bursting at the seams with unwanted ones, and ending up homeless in the first place. Some facilities are warehousing animals (namely, dogs), and turning others away, with many refusing to accept cats altogether, instead condemning cats to be abandoned on the streets as “community” cats—a particularly egregious policy, given a new study revealing that cats allowed to roam outdoors terrorize, maim and kill more than 2,000 species of animals. And while these slow-kill policies leave the most vulnerable animals with nowhere to go, leading to abandoned dogs and cats not just reproducing and creating even more unwanted animals but also suffering and/or dying of starvation, trauma, disease, or abuse on the streets, facilities with “no-kill” policies enjoy positive PR by advertising a misleading at best and dishonest at worst “90% save rate”—and the open-admission shelters that never refuse admission to animals in need (and are therefore most in need of funding) are vilified.The solution here is for shelters to remember the meaning of the word “shelter” and keep their doors open to all animals in need—and for communities and individuals to focus on prevention, meaning spay/neuter requirements and bans on breeding and selling animals in pet stores, as Los Angeles, with its notoriously troubled shelter system, is now preparing to do.
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If you are tired of donating to the big national groups that push managed intake or even the shelters that have implemented it, there is now another option. If you believe that the only way out of the mess that has been created is through spay and neuter, please consider donating to United Spay Alliance (USA) and fund more spay/neuter. USA has an impressive board that is focused on spay and neuter. And by using the link below, you can donate to the national fund that will allow money to be spent for spay/neuter where it is most needed OR you can donate to a fund for spay/neuter in your state! Here is the link: https://www.unitedspayalliance.org/donate/
PS: The biggest killer of animals is not cats but rather humans.
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Beth Frank is founder/president of Community Cats United, Inc, Fixfinder and Proactive Animal Sheltering. Beth has spent endless hours researching animal sheltering and analyzing shelter data from all over the US, including over 400 shelters. Click here to follow Proactive Animal Sheltering on Facebook.
Community Cats United, Inc. is a CommUNITY of over 100,000 including in all 50 US states and 127 countries.