'No-kill' is no solution to animal homelessness

Last year, a family called PETA seeking help for their dying cat. The cat was elderly, rail thin, cold to the touch, moaning and too weak even to lift his head. Despite his hopeless condition, a local "no-kill" shelter had refused to help him because the family could not afford the mandatory 40-dollar surrender fee.

That's just one example of how "no-kill" policies—which some people are pressuring animal shelters across the country to adopt—make shelters' euthanasia statistics look good but leave desperate animals high and dry.

PETA and other open-admission animal shelters are there for thousands of local animals like that dying cat. A Virginia official speaking of PETA's euthanasia rate acknowledged to USA Today, "PETA will basically take anything that comes through the door, and other shelters won't do that." Turning away animals might allow "no-kill" facilities to boast that they "never euthanize," but it takes a certain lack of conscience to slam the door in the face of an animal in desperate need.

If a community becomes "no-kill" before first becoming "no-birth," consider where tens of thousands of cast-off animals each year will end up. Animals who are turned away by "no-kill" shelters don't vanish into thin air. They are dumped on the streets, sentenced to a miserable life on a chain or in a dirty pen in the yard of someone who doesn't even want them or cruelly killed by people who are desperate to get rid of them.

This scenario plays out wherever communities become more concerned with statistics than helping individual animals. In Easton, Pennsylvania, the homeless cat population exploded after the local shelter became "no-kill" and was perpetually too full to accept strays. The town's exasperated mayor commented, "The no-kill killed us. That's what did it."

Even animals who are accepted into "no-kill" facilities are far from safe. This month, a Humane Society of North Texas investigator found 91 sick and emaciated cats inside a feces-strewn trailer run by a self-professed "rescuer." The cats had been handed over to the hoarder by the city of Fort Worth as part of a push to reduce its euthanasia rates.

At Florida's "no-kill" Caboodle Ranch, a PETA investigation found nearly 700 cats in moldy trailers that reeked of ammonia and wooden sheds that were strewn with vomit, trash and waste. Cats suffering from severe upper-respiratory infections gasped for air and struggled to breathe. One cat was left to languish for months with a perforated cornea and eventually died.

Animals need more than a roof over their heads. They need a committed guardian who will love and care for them for life. Every animal born can have such a home if we concentrate on the right end of this tragedy.

As many readers know, PETA has led the charge against animal homelessness in our own community by sterilizing—for free or a token amount—more than 80,000 animals in the last decade. To solve this problem without harming animals in the effort, we must all work together to implement mandatory spay/neuter laws, outlaw animal sales at pet shops, sterilize our own and our neighbors' animals, and visit less fortunate areas to help those who do not have the resources to sterilize their animals. Turning away unwanted animals or handing them over to unregulated "rescues," which is inevitable in a "no-kill community," will only increase animal neglect and deaths in our neighborhoods.

Teresa Chagrin is an animal care and control specialist in People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' (PETA) Cruelty Investigations Department, 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510; http://www.PETA.org.