Crossposted at Pet Connection.
My SFGate.com column yesterday, about the common ground between those who support and those
who oppose mandatory spay/neuter, drew a lot of comments that reminded
me of something that happened back in the dawn of time — excuse me, in
the early 90s which for many of you is the same thing. That’s when the
San Francisco SPCA did something most people considered completely
outrageous: They decided to stop doing animal control for the City and
County of San Francisco, and to put into place an innovative program
whereby they’d stop killing cats and dogs.
Back then, there were no seminars on the “No-kill Nation,” no other towns, communities, and even states that had begun going down that same road, no organizations like Maddie's Fund, financing community programs to work towards a “no-kill” goal, nor any successful implementations of a program like this for SFSPCA to model itself on.
People who ran or worked in many other shelters in the region — and let me remind you I live here; this is all coming from my own personal experience and things said directly to me or in my presence — ranted and raved that SFSPCA wasn’t actually “stopping the killing,” they were just letting someone else do it, by which they meant them — other area shelters, or the newly-built San Francisco Animal Care and Control Center. SFSPCA doesn’t even take in strays or owner surrenders, they’d add. They just cherry pick the best of the best and stand around being proud of not killing. And we get stuck with the “unadoptables” while SFSPCA looks good.
And they were right. They were absolutely right.
And yet today, San Francisco — not the SFSPCA, but the entire county — sends more dogs and cats alive out of the shelter system (86 percent) than all but one other county in the United States (Tompkins County, New York, which releases 91 percent of its dogs and cats).
Again: Not that one shelter. The whole county.
So you’d think everyone would be happy about that, and say wow, why do we need punitive and intrusive breeding bans and mandatory spay/neuter? Why don’t we just do what San Francisco did?
“What worked in San Francisco can’t work anywhere else,” they said gloomily. “San Francisco is special.”
Then when other communities did what San Francisco did — communities in rural areas, in the South, communities with lots of pit bulls and poverty — they said it was just a numbers game. Definitions of “adoptable” and “unadoptable” and “treatable” and “healthy” were being manipulated to make the numbers look good. San Francisco and these other communities, they said, are just lying. They say they don’t kill treatable animals, but they do.
And I know a lot of you, like some of the people who commented on my column, are sitting there now going “GOTCHA!” You’re wondering how I’m going to argue my way out of that one.
But I’m not. Because you’re absolutely right. While there are certainly definitions of “healthy” and “adoptable” that almost everyone will agree on, they are still ultimately subjective terms and thus, subject to interpretation and “spin.” And do they get “spun”? They sure do.
And so I say, let’s not define them, argue over them, or debate their meaning. Let’s stop using them.
See, I don’t give a damn about how the animals in a community are categorized or defined. I just want to know one thing: How many leave your shelter system alive?
Unlike words, numbers tend to be hard to spin. Not impossible, of course, but much more difficult. So if you focus on the live release rate, what happens to the whole argument over definitions of “adoptable” animals? Poof. Gone. Everyone won.
The No Kill Advocacy Center suggests the goal live release rate should be over 90 percent for a “no-kill” community. This basically means that the only animals killed by a shelter system would be those animals that any loving owner would euthanize for reasons of severe illness, injury, or aggression.
Will there still be some treatable animals, those who with some care could have their illness, injury, or aggression resolved, wrongly put to sleep? Yes. But I see loving pet owners wrongly putting pets to sleep every day, because they couldn’t afford their vet bills, or their vets were unaware of possible new treatments, or because the owner had a prejudice against a certain kind of treatment, such as amputation. We might like to daydream about a perfect world in which no mistakes are made, but that’s not the world we live in. Arguing about that ten percent is a tactic meant only to divide, to divert attention from an achievable, meaningful and relatively objective goal.
So how about we stop wasting time, and diverting attention and energy, with pointless, unresolvable debates over categorizing animals? Let’s focus instead on one more patch of common ground: Sending almost every animal who comes into the shelter system out alive.
Colleen looks so beautiful in that picture. I miss her.
Travis
Posted by: Travis | 27 July 2007 at 06:05 PM