Dogged Blog

Was the Westminster/Pedigree split really about pet adoption?

Did the Westminster Kennel Club dump longtime sponsor Pedigree because it has a problem with shelter pet adoption, or because Pedigree's ads promoting shelter pet adoption made them want to kill themselves?

The New York Times covered the story, reporting WKC spokesman David Frei as saying, "We want people to think of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show as a celebration of the dogs in our lives. ... Show me an ad with a dog with a smile; don’t try to shame me."

Pedigree responded by saying Westminster was actually against the cause of shelter dog adoption in and of itself, particularly the adoption of mixed breed dogs rather than purebreds.

I have no idea of what's really behind the split, but as I read the Times piece, I was struck again by the great divide in how different people try to "sell" pet adoption. Despite research from the Ad Council that found people are not motivated to adopt pets by sad pictures of pets behind bars or stories of suffering, those types of messages are still constantly being used by groups whose stated goal is to get pets adopted.

What those messages do is two-fold. First, they make people feel miserable and overwhelmed. They also tend to make people break out the checkbook. That's right; they're good for raising money, not finding homes for pets.

And Pedigree knows that. From the Times article:

Last year, nearly three and a half million viewers watched the Westminster Kennel Club show (and the commercials), which was broadcast on the USA Network and CNBC. Ms. Martellotti declined to say how much money Pedigree had paid to sponsor the show, but said the partnership had been a boon to its adoption initiatives. In 2007, Pedigree received $500,000 in pledges after its graphic ads were broadcast over the show’s two days.

“People did not look away,” she said. “They were inspired to pick up the phone and make donations.”

Also interviewed in the article was Sandra DeFeo, the executive director of the Humane Society of New York, who was quoted as saying they chose to focus on uplifting images of shelter pets in their promotions. She added that people "need to know" that animals are suffering and dying, but that they can't handle it.

I think she's mixing up her messages. When you're working on shelter reform, absolutely, you need to spread the word that animals are suffering and dying needlessly, due to antiquated practices that can and must be changed.

But when you're doing adoption, tragedy and misery don't work. Most people outside the rescue community (most of the members of which, by the way, already have all the pets they can adopt) want the adoption of a new family pet to be a happy experience. In both the Ad Council's research and that done by PetSmart Charities, people have demonstrated concern over adopting from shelters as being depressing and upsetting. How on earth does showing these miserable images address that concern?

It doesn't; it reinforces it. It might raise money for the organizations running the ads, but it doesn't get people to adopt shelter pets.

So I, for one, am glad to see someone calling that type of adoption ad into question. And I ask Pedigree, and anyone else who supports (or claims to support) pet adoption, to really consider if their ads are serving that goal, or setting it back.

Note: "Pet Adoption Videos That Don’t Make Me Want To Kill Myself" is a category on the blog of Edie Jarolim, Will My Dog Hate Me?

Failing shelters dodge blame. News at 11.

Take a look at these two photos of puppies in an animal shelter. Which photo would you think would be more effective in getting homes for those pups?

I was giving some assistance to a rescue group in another state that was dealing with a particularly difficult rescue situation. After looking over their proposed adoption listings, complete with all the details of their tragic story and gory photographs of the hellish animal control facility they'd been rescued from, I told them their approach, and in particular those photos, were not going to be effective in marketing those pets for adoption.

I got back a blistering tirade over how I shouldn't "accuse" or "blame" the shelter (words I never used, by the way), but rather blame the people who "forced" the shelter to treat animals this way because they wouldn't spay and neuter or be responsible.

Now, my point was about marketing, not shelter reform, but it was clear I hit a nerve. And guess what, rescue person? You hit one right back -- the one where I'm so sick and tired of this blame-shifting that I'm ready to scream.

No one is forcing anyone to kill or mistreat animals, not in your state nor any other. (In fact, I'm not sure you understand the meaning of the word "force." The people who work in the shelter in question do not have a gun held to their heads.) They may be killing these animals, and caring for them so badly, because they believe they have no choice, but they're wrong. And in this day and age, with progressive and proven sheltering practices spreading across the continent and even beyond, to hide behind that tired old whine is even less believable than it ever was.

If people mired in this old-school, ineffective, failed paradigm would step out of it for a few minutes, they'd realize how bad they're making themselves look every time they, always predictably, trot it out. "It's not our fault we do what we do," they say. "It's all the bad people! Blame them! We're just helpless victims!"

You people really need some new material.

My suggestion that you get new photos will help get those pets into homes. Think about that while you continue to enable your community's filthy high-kill shelter to fail the animals inside its walls.

Then go get a freaking camera. Because after all, everyone wants to adopt puppies who are smeared with feces and looking out through rusty cage bars, right?

Photo on left from Nevada  Humane Society presentation on increasing pet adoptions. Photo on right courtesy of Nathan Winograd.

Could Scruffy's Law have saved Lucy the Lab?

The Kansas Humane Society took about ten minutes to kill a young, healthy Lab named Lucy after her owner surrendered her -- just enough time for the owner to break down in the parking lot, change her mind, and come back in to get her back. From Yes Biscuit:

Ms. Nott went to her car in the pound’s parking lot and called her sister, sobbing.  Together, they decided that Ms. Nott should go back and get Lucy and they would “figure something out”.  But when she returned to the pound’s lobby, she learned the Kansas Humane Society had already deemed Lucy unadoptable – due to the description of the inappropriate chewing behaviors – and had killed her.

Their defense of this turbo-charged timeline is that her behavior problem -- excessive chewing and destructive behavior when alone -- would have precluded her from being adopted, and they wanted to spare her the stress of being in the shelter by killing her.

The ASPCA, a national organization that runs a shelter in New York City, weighed in, saying that the onus of Lucy's death is really on her owner, who should have known better than to have brought her to an "open-admission" shelter -- by which they mean "kill shelter," since there are plenty of open-admission shelters that would not have killed Lucy or a dog like her.

Now, maybe Lucy's owner really sucked. I don't know. Mostly I find that people who sob in the parking lot after surrendering their dog, and who surrender her with her toys, treats, brush and special food, as Lucy's owner did, don't actually suck. They're just at the end of their personal resources.

But let's say she sucks. Let me tell you why this is still the fault of the Kansas Humane Society and its defender, the ASPCA.

Lucy the Lab was not owned by someone who raised money by saying they were there to help animals. She did not  have the word "Humane" in her name, nor the phrase "Prevention of Cruelty to Animals." She was not a non-profit charitable organization. She did not have as her stated mission the protection of pets.

Lucy's owner told the Wichita Eagle:

I think the public needs to know what really goes on out there.... It is the Humane Society, after all. Whatever happened yesterday was not humane.

Animal shelters exist because some pet owners suck, and because even those who don't suck get into situations where they can't keep their pets. Blaming that predictable, eternal reality (being "overburdened," in the ASPCA's words) for an organization killing healthy young animals because they don't know what else to do with them is not just a failure of compassion and morality, it is a form of deceit being perpetrated on every person who donates a dollar to those organizations.

The Kansas Humane Society should not have accepted Lucy if they were going to kill her.

The ASPCA should not have defended them for doing so.

Perhaps Lucy's owner should have had her change of heart ten minutes earlier. Since she's not out there running ads on late night TV asking me to send her money to take care of "dogs like Lucy," that's between her and her conscience.

Scruffy's Law wouldn't necessarily have saved Lucy's life. But it would probably have turned down the flow of revenue to the Kansas "shelter" by forcing them to remove the word "humane" from their name as long as they were killing young healthy dogs like Lucy. Perhaps that threat would have been enough to push them to comply with the requirement that they have to earn that designation by saving at least 90 percent of the pets who come in their doors.

Read more about Scruffy and Scruffy's law here. And don't donate to organizations that use the words "humane," "shelter," or "prevention of cruelty to animals" unless they've earned them.

 

Scruffy's Law: Making animal organizations tell the truth

Here's a law I can get behind.

That's because it's not an unfunded mandate, and it's not micro-management. It's just truth in advertising.

We need to pass a law that animal organizations that kill more than 10 percent of the animals that come in their doors may not use the words "humane," "shelter," or "prevention of cruelty" in their names.

I suggest we call it "Scruffy's Law," after the bottle-fed kitten killed by the Arizona "Humane" Society the other day, after they refused to provide emergency medical care for a cut that needed stitches unless her owner signed her over to them -- even though his mother was ready and able to pay for the care immediately with a credit card over the phone. From Yes Biscuit:

A 49 year old Phoenix man named Daniel Dockery bottle fed a kitten from birth whom he named Scruffy.  He raised enough money to get her spayed when she was old enough, fed her tuna, and slept next to her on the pillow at night.  Mr. Dockery credits Scruffy with helping him to remain sober for one year after battling a lifelong addiction illness.

Earlier this month, 9 month old Scruffy apparently cut herself on fencing and Mr. Dockery took her to the Arizona Humane Society for treatment.  Unable to come up with $400 on the spot, Mr. Dockery asked if the facility would accept his mother’s credit card by phone (she lives in MI) or be willing to accept payment the next day after his mother wired him the cash.  The Arizona Humane Society would do neither.  In fact, they reportedly advised Mr. Dockery that the only way for Scruffy to receive treatment was for him to sign over ownership.  He reluctantly complied.

For the next 3 weeks, Mr. Dockery searched area shelters and repeatedly asked staff about Scruffy.  He kept getting the runaround.  Finally this week, Mr. Dockery learned that Scruffy had been killed shortly after he signed ownership over to the Arizona Humane Society...

Their explanation? They lacked the resources to treat Scruffy, because they took in too many animals that day.

Why did they take her, then? Beats the hell out of me, and anyone else with a lick of sense or ounce of compassion. Scruffy had an owner -- an owner apparently quite willing to suffer for the sake of his pet, and a family member willing to pay for her care. 

In what universe did this make sense?

Only in a universe where an organization like this gets to market itself with the word "humane" in its name.

It's a simple fix, folks. A consumer protection law that will cost almost nothing, just some signs and new business cards. Heck, it will create jobs! Talk about a win-win!

And if they don't want to change their name, that's a simple fix, too. It's called the No Kill Equation. All the cool kids are doing it!

What do you say: Are you on board with Scruffy's Law?

Are your pet adoption listings hurting pets?

This is my question for people writing pet adoption listings and posts: What are you trying to do?

That's not a rhetorical question. It's a sincere one, inspired by a disturbing conversation I had recently with some rescue group volunteers.

I manage a Facebook page for a campaign promoting shelter pet adoption. We welcome people posting pets needing homes on our wall, but there's a catch.

The research done for the campaign found that in order to find homes for all the dogs and cats currently dying in shelters, we need to push beyond the circle of people who adopt pets already. In other words, we need to market shelter pet adoption to a group of people who aren't already doing it.

It's not a lot of people, relative to the number who are adding pets to their families every year. In fact, it's a very doable task. But standing in the way is the perception on the part of many of these potential adopters that shelters are horrible, dank, scary places where terrible things happen, and that shelter pets  are neglected, unsocialized, sad, badly behaved and sickly.

Add to it negative emotions like guilt and fear, and whammo: they're turned off. They get their pet somewhere else.

So, how do you think those adopters are going to feel when they see a listing like this:

Sweet Leisha cries in her cage, she doesn't know why she is in the shelter, she doesn't know that it isn't her fault that they are going to kill her. She has done nothing wrong, yet here she sits, in a cold shelter. Leisha is a good girl, a friendly girl, an affectionate sweetheart that only wants to love and be loved. Can you foster or adopt Leisha? Her life is depending on it!

Or this one, titled, "To be destroyed Tuesday!":

New photo on sweet Sandy xoxo. Poor girl is just a baby yet the ACC decided to wrong her as they do so many others. She has a behavior rating of NONE and was hidden away in a back room until she caught "the cold". NEVER had a chance to be adopted or walked because 95% of the volunteers are only allowed to walk the 17 (yes, 17) dogs in adoptions. Thank god we at least have a picture... Just look at Sandy's eyes.. they are the window to her soul and I swear this dog has a pure soul that is full of love. Help her... SAVE HER!

In talking with a group of rescuers who have been posting these types of messages a lot lately, I said, "You know, if we want to save all the pets in shelters, we have to appeal to adopters who won't respond to this kind of message. We have to focus on the pet and his or her personality, and make them seem appealing and the adoption process seem fun and rewarding."

The reply? "We want to tell it this way, because we need people to know what's going on at  the shelter, and how bad it is, and how many wonderful pets are dying there every day."

I get it. You want to reform your local shelter. It makes perfect sense, and you should do it.

But not at the expense of the animals in that shelter.

Look at Austin, Tex. In the midst of a very intense fight to reform their local animal control agency, the adoption group, Austin Pets Alive!, stayed out of the political fray and focused on getting pets into homes. Day after day, while FixAustin.org stormed the barricades, APA! wrote glowing, sunny adoption listings, pointing out how wonderful every pet was, and appealing to the broadest possible group of adopters while turning off no one. Like this one for Shakespeare, the dog in the photo on this post:

Shakespeare is poetry in motion. He is super active, very curious, and loves to play.

Shakespeare has had a bad break. He injured his leg a long time ago and it healed at an odd angle. But that doesn't bother this Chihuahua mix one bit. He can keep up on a walk with no problem!

Once he knows you and can tell you want to be his friend, he will crawl right in your lap and love all over you! He is a happy-go-lucky dog who needs a home to call his very own.

Come see Shakespeare today and see all that he has to offer!

Today, Austin has reformed its shelter and is a no-kill city. Last month they saved 96 percent of the homeless dogs and cats in their community. They'd reached nearly 80 percent city-wide even before getting a new director at the city shelter, just on the strength of their adoption and rescue efforts alone.

Would you like some of that in your community? Then stop mixing your messages. Don't use pet adoption listings as a weapon of attack against bad sheltering practices.  Separate the two causes. Because ugly, frightening messages like the ones I pasted above will not only turn many adopters off of adopting that pet, but off pet adoption in general. Your messages are poisoning the well for other pets in your community and, thanks to the power of social media, pets all over the country.

When you want to adopt pets, focus on the pets and their personalities. Get people to feel curious and excited about them. Think about a soccer mom while you're writing the listing, and consider whether it describes a pet she'd want sleeping on her kids' feet at night, or one she'll perceive as a PTSD victim bringing baggage full of doom and gloom into her family.

And when you want to reform your shelter, Austin did it this way; check it out and try it in your community.

But leave the animals out of it; they are entirely innocent and should not be dragged into an ugly political battle, or tarnished by the ugliness happening at our country's worst shelters.

And above all, realize that potential adopters who are already on the fence shouldn't be shoved over to the other side by "WILL DIE TOMORROW" messages about "death row" and "hellhole shelter" and "slaughterhouse."

Where you find caffeinated pet foster homes

I saw this flyer at the Starbucks in Auburn Hills, Mich. In case anyone's wondering, this is how you get more foster homes: go to where the people are, tell them why it's something they'll get a lot out of and that it saves animals, and put photos of cute pets on it.

Notice nearly all the phone tabs are gone.

This Starbucks is located in a very wealthy community very near one of the branches of the high-kill (77+ percent) Michigan Humane Society. Wonder if they could kill a few less animals if they were equally aggressive recruiting foster homes?

Memphis: It doesn't have to be this way

You know, I can barely stand to read Yes Biscuit! these days, because all the Memphis Animal Shelter webcam pictures of dogs being dragged to the kill room gut me.

But this afternoon I was thinking about how people say those webcams make doing their jobs so much harder for the staff at the facility, and make them worry about their personal safety, and give Memphis a bad name and could be taken out of context and all the other things they say about the webcams.

I typically responded to that by saying, "Yeah, well, at least you're not being dragged to your death under horrible circumstances," but you know what?

What we're seeing on those cameras is cruelty to animals, but it's also cruelty to the people who work at MAS. If it's not making them wake up screaming every night with terror-filled dreams, then it's eroding their compassion and deadening their empathy. It's consuming their humanity, one needle full of Fatal-Plus at a time.

We know this because we've been told again and again by people who do it what the effect of shelter killing is on them. We can see it right in front of us when we look at those webcam shots, and imagine how the shelter workers have to shut their eyes to the terror of the dogs they drag down that hall.

Have to watch a garbage can full of squirmy puppies grow still and stop moving.

Have to see the rigid terror of the cat at the end of the catchpole relax into death.

Have to do it over and over again, hundreds of pets a week, an avalanche of death and fear and piss and shit. It never ends. Three out of four dogs and cats who come in the doors of the building where they work are going to be fed by them and watered by them and then dragged or carried down that long hallway, step by fearful step, until they're killed.

And one day, they just can't care anymore. And that's the day a part of them dies, too.

So even if you think that Memphis is doing the best it can for the animals -- which it's not -- tell me, do you think it's doing the best it can for the people who work there?

Imagine for a few minutes that instead of experiencing this:

... the staff at the Memphis Animal Shelter, like their counterparts at the Nevada Humane Society, could feel like this:

It's not impossible. It could happen.

Here's how.

Photos: Top, a MAS staffer and a terrified dog. Bottom, two Nevada Humane Society staffers celebrating an adoption.

Miami Herald has bad advice for shelter reformers

It may be time to come together to save the animals in Miami, but what exactly is the community supposed to come together and do?

This morning the Miami Herald published an editorial exhorting local activists to "put down their signs" and unite to help the new shelter director do a better job for the animals of Miami-Dade.

Specifically, it urged them to abandon their current form of activism -- organized protest -- and instead work to implement and support spay/neuter programs, calling them "the only proven method to bring down the shelter population."

To paraphrase Senator Daniel Moynihan, the Miami Herald, like all of us, is entitled to its own opinions -- but not its own facts.

Spay/neuter programs, while essential, are not the "only proven method" of reducing shelter population.

Innovative return to owner programs -- like those in Reno, Nev., and Calgary, Alberta -- have been proven to bring down shelter population.

Foster care programs have been proven to bring down shelter population.

Aggressive, creative adoption programs have been proven to bring down shelter population.

Owner retention programs -- support and assistance to pet-owners who are struggling to keep, feed or get vet care for their pets -- have been proven to bring down shelter population.

Great community relations so you can have lots of rescue groups, volunteers, supporters and donors to help get pets rehabbed, treated and adopted have been proven to bring down shelter population.

Bringing in great people who know how to get community and local government support has been proven to bring down shelter population.

A good relationship with the media, in order to get the word out to the community about adoptions as well as spay/neuter and owner retention support, has been proven to bring down shelter population.

Putting the entire burden of improving shelter intake and shelter numbers on spay/neuter just creates a sense of helplessness in everyone currently working to save animals, from the local government to the shelter director to the local media to the volunteers, staff and rescue groups all the way out to the entire community.

That's because spay/neuter is always "someday." It does nothing to save the lives of animals already born, nor those in the shelter right now. This means people put all their effort and energy into something without any immediate reduction in the suffering and death of their community's animals. It's demoralizing.

All those other proven programs, on the other hand, create excitement. They give people a sense of purpose. They create immediate gratification, thus rewarding volunteers, activists, employees, fosterers and rescuers for their efforts -- which typically causes people to try even harder.

The animals those programs save are also pretty glad about it.

It's possible, Miami Herald, to ask your community to come together and get a job done without asserting as a proven truth something that isn't so, and asking them to embrace a paradigm that is both ineffective and demoralizing.

By all means, beg them to keep your community's low-cost spay/neuter program in place. But to say that's the whole game? You are doing your community, its animals and the shelter staff and director a huge, huge disservice.

Regime change at Memphis Animal Shelter

Embattled Memphis Animal Shelter administrator Matthew Pepper threw in the towel on August 9. The story broke this evening on WMC-TV; h/t to Ryan Clinton:

Pepper sent his letter of resignation to Director Janet Hooks on August 9.

Pepper was named to the position in February of 2010.  In the year since he took the job, the shelter has been plagued with problems, including employees charged with animal cruelty.

Blogger Shirley Thistlewaite at Yes Biscuit!, who has been covering problems at MAS relentlessly for more than a year now, had this to say:

He leaves in his wake a city pound in turmoil, with one ACO facing criminal charges on multiple counts of animal cruelty, daily webcam images which appear to show needless killing and abuse, and locks on the doors to the stray area where hundreds of dogs languish without hope.

I hope, with all my heart, that the annual slaughter of thousands of healthy, friendly Memphis pets ends here.

[....]

This is your moment Memphis.  You have a choice.  Please, stop the abuse.  Stop the killing.

From your keyboard to Dog's ears, Shirley.

Photo: Just one of thousands of heartbreaking images from the MAS webcam, as published on Yes Biscuit!

Dear kill shelters: Please close your 'open' doors

If a person were taking in 10 pets a day and killing 7 or 8 of them every night, then taking 10 more in the next day, would you call them an "open admission pet-owner," or a serial habitual animal abuser?

Seriously -- if I see one more "shelter" defend their killing rate by proudly pointing out they're "open admission," I'm going to scream. I think continuing to take in animals you have no room for is stupid and immoral, and ten times more so when you then turn around and kill them. And to brag about it? Are you nuts?

Take the Michigan Humane Society, which kills nearly three-quarters of the animals it takes in, does not hold an animal control contract, and proudly brags that it's "open admission." I have a suggestion for you, MHS: Close your freaking door and stop killing all those animals.

That goes for Memphis Animal Shelter, too. They recently justified their kill rate, also around 75 percent, by saying they are the only  "open admission" shelter in their entire region.

Using the term "open admission" this way is the latest iteration of the "there's no such thing as 'no-kill,' it's just 'someone else kill'" defense. Essentially it's the implication that as long as strays are taken in and people are given the option of seeking shelter for a pet anytime and for any reason, the only possible outcome is that some -- often most -- of those animals will be killed by the very organization that takes them in. If they were "no kill," by this logic, they'd say "no" to some pet owners, who would just head for the "shelter" up the road that would say "yes" and then kill them.

Why do they think it's moral to take in animals you're only going to turn around and kill? Because of the "fate worse than death" defense.

Essentially organizations like this contend that an "open door" to animals who will be killed is preferable to an uncertain fate on the other side of that door.

Are there really only two options for these pets, death or "a fate worse than death"? Of course not.

Just look at Washoe County, Nev., and Calgary in Alberta, Canada, where innovative return-to-owner programs have reduced the intake and sheltering of stray dogs to such low numbers that the community can save the few who aren't able to go back to their families.

And look at shelters experimenting with making appointments for owner surrenders, places like PAWS Chicago. They save enough space in their program so they can take in urgent cases on the spot. However, they ask other pet owners to make arrangements for a future surrender date.

What they've found is that that most people are fine with that, knowing that if things become urgent the door is open, but happy to know that their pet will be given the shelter's full attention and a careful, loving re-homing at a planned, future moment.

Anecdotally, and this is something I think most rescuers have seen, I've observed that once a person knows there is an "out" from the pressure and stress of whatever is leading them to give up their pet, they sometimes see their way clear to keeping the pet, or become more able to find the pet a home themselves, or at least, they get enough relief from the stress of worrying about it that they're okay waiting for a little while.

Since there's no data that I'm aware of -- and if you know of some, I'd like to see it! -- demonstrating that the "open door" does  a better job of preventing these pets from being abandoned than programs like that do, you'd think it would be a moral imperative for self-described "shelters" to not take in animals they're going to turn around and kill, and give those programs a try.

Instead, they keep that damn door open as wide as possible and then brag about it -- even though what they're really bragging about is bad management, a lack of planning, and a failure to implement creative alternative strategies that are working in other communities.

All in the name of finding a scrap of moral high-ground to stand on while taking another pull from the bottle of Fatal-Plus.