Reality
One of my co-volunteers at DAS e-mailed me Saturday to say that the shelter euthanized 100 cats on Thursday, including kittens and four nursing mothers with their litters. The fosters of another volunteer were on the list too. I do not know what to do with this knowledge.
The two volunteers I work with, experts really, quit a few weeks ago because they were mortified at the callous management of the shelter population by the on-site vet and shelter manager. I stuck around because the cages need to get cleaned regardless of who is giving orders, but I didn't realize it had gotten this bad.
On the one hand, what else are they supposed to do? They have this shiny new, much larger shelter, which makes everyone feel better about ditching their animals when times get tough, but they didn't get the requisite increase in staff to manage the population explosion. So the shelter fills up, sicknesses spread like wildfire, and there aren't enough people coming in to adopt even the healthy ones. It is unsustainable.
On the other hand, mass euthanization of perfectly adoptable animals is unacceptable. Public support of the Denton Animal Shelter has been remarkable in recent years--we owe the new shelter almost exclusively to private funding--yet it culminates in this? And this is just a snapshot of the reality shared by thousands of city shelters in this country. If the greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated (Ghandi), then we are failing miserably.
I've always known that my couple of hours a week can't make much of a difference, but I thought that doing something was at least better than doing nothing. Whether I can stomach the bleak realities or not is irrelevant. But I was there on Wednesday, and I tended to two mothers with adorable newborns as well many other beautiful kittens and cats. I keep thinking how that was probably their last day, and I may have been the last human to show them kindness. It is really too much to take.
The two volunteers I work with, experts really, quit a few weeks ago because they were mortified at the callous management of the shelter population by the on-site vet and shelter manager. I stuck around because the cages need to get cleaned regardless of who is giving orders, but I didn't realize it had gotten this bad.
On the one hand, what else are they supposed to do? They have this shiny new, much larger shelter, which makes everyone feel better about ditching their animals when times get tough, but they didn't get the requisite increase in staff to manage the population explosion. So the shelter fills up, sicknesses spread like wildfire, and there aren't enough people coming in to adopt even the healthy ones. It is unsustainable.
On the other hand, mass euthanization of perfectly adoptable animals is unacceptable. Public support of the Denton Animal Shelter has been remarkable in recent years--we owe the new shelter almost exclusively to private funding--yet it culminates in this? And this is just a snapshot of the reality shared by thousands of city shelters in this country. If the greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated (Ghandi), then we are failing miserably.
I've always known that my couple of hours a week can't make much of a difference, but I thought that doing something was at least better than doing nothing. Whether I can stomach the bleak realities or not is irrelevant. But I was there on Wednesday, and I tended to two mothers with adorable newborns as well many other beautiful kittens and cats. I keep thinking how that was probably their last day, and I may have been the last human to show them kindness. It is really too much to take.