Here’s an e-mail I got today from a horse and dog rescuer (Help A Horse Organization) who is rather miffed at my “Buy From a Breeder” rhetoric. I think she missed the point. She also failed to appreciate the elements of my post that were sarcastic and parroting the PeTA rhetoric, despite my caveat at the end of the post; this is perhaps because she is a parrot for PeTA herself.
The sad thing about Parrots is that they sound like they are rational and intelligent, but they have no idea what they’re really saying since they don’t have to think about it. They just mimic. That’s the beauty of mantras and why they are so popular by groups that control and influence the masses (religions, political parties, governments, advertisers, schools, social clubs, militias, guilds, unions, etc.): they are easy to repeat and require little or no thought.
I haven’t been to a church service in years, but I can still recite almost the entire mass. And really, when you’re saying the Pledge of Allegiance, singing the National Anthem, or saying a prayer, are you really thinking about the words? When was the last time you analyzed the words of your favorite song on the radio, if ever?
Since this affords me a golden opportunity to rebut an actual argument instead of summarizing my perception of an opponent’s argument, my responses are interspersed with the Rescuer’s letter:
Hello. I have a few comments about your post: Buy From a Breeder, Never Adopt
That was sick and horrible and disgusting! You can’t just put all shelters and rescues in one category and label it “DISGRACEFUL”. Do you know how many dogs and cats are rescued?
I am not a victim of employing the some-all fallacy where the qualities of a subset of a group are applied to every member of that group. I don’t believe that ALL rescues are poorly run by incompetent boobs, nor do I believe that ALL shelters are disgraceful. If a shelter does the stupid and irresponsible things that I am criticizing, then my venom applies to them. If they do not, then it does not. It’s rather simple, really.
I think you are failing to realize that my post is mocking the tone and rhetoric of PeTA’s advertisement. I believe everything I say in my post, but it’s not the “whole truth” it is simply my observations that tip PeTA’s absolutist message on its head. I answered absolutism with absolutism. Between the two, my absolutism is better.
And yes, every time you buy from a breeder a shelter dog/cat DOES die. YOU could’ve saved that dog/cat from being euthanized, but you DIDN’T, so now that dog/cat must suffer.
This is an example of the zero-sum fallacy and the fallacy of a false dilemma. You are mistaken if you think that the market for animals is so fixed that to buy an animal leads to another one’s death. It is not a zero-sum game and to suggest such is banal, asinine, and jejune.
Since you live in a zero-sum world, let me inform you of what an evil and vile person you are in hopes that you will kill yourself so that someone better can be born.
The clothes you are hoarding now in your closets and chest-of-drawers could be used to clothe the needy. Your vanity and greed is keeping hundreds of people cold and naked. Every shoe you wear means someone is without protection for their feet. You torture people with your greed.
Every breath you take is a breath that is stolen from someone else who deserves it more, especially new born babies struggling for their first bit of air. Every breath you take kills a newborn baby who is denied that oxygen. That makes you a baby killer.
There are starving children in Africa. Every mouthful of food you eat is nutrition that you are denying them. Every time you swallow, you kill a child in Africa. You sicko.
Drought and famine killed thousands of people today due to lack of drinkable water for people, livestock, and crops. When you brushed your teeth, you wasted water that could have saved a cow. That cow is now dead because you wasted its water. When you flushed the toilet, you polluted enough water to meet the needs of an adult man. He’s dead now and his wife and children will soon follow. You killed him. The shower you took sealed the rest of the family’s fate. The water you wasted could have given them sustenance, but they won’t survive the night for lack of that water. You are a serial killer now.
The reality of your zero-sum world really sucks for you, doesn’t it. Do the right thing, die so that others more deserving may live. Your wardrobe could clothe hundreds, your wasted breath could allow thousands to live, the food and water you consume is directly leading to a genocide of starving and parched people the world over. The scales of justice has you one one side and hundreds of thousands of people on the other. How do you sleep at night knowing that your very existence is a modern holocaust?
If you are so concerned about the shelter conditions, maybe YOU should rescue. Obviously you know nothing about animals and you want the animals to die. They only kill the animals because THERE ARE TOO MANY! Hello? Have you heard of the overpopulation problem?
You are now applying an ad hominem tu quoque fallacy. The pitiful situation kill shelters find themselves in now has no bearing on my participation or lack thereof. Just like you shift the blame for killing from the shelters who do it (they are not forced!) to nameless “bad owners, breeders, and pet stores” you are now trying to shift the burden of your failures on to me.
My primary concern does not lie in shelter conditions but in the condition of the dogs themselves. The failure of the shelter system is not my concern, not supporting the further failures is. Trying to shift the burden of proof on to me is ridiculous. So is your thought that if I went and saved an animal right now that it would make the shelter system any better. It would not.
I don’t want animals to die. Rather the opposite, I just bred my dogs. This strongly suggests that I want animals to live. I also found all the puppies I didn’t keep excellent homes and I have a contract that demands that I will take back the animals at any time for any reason if the new owners’ situations change. My dogs will never end up in a shelter for any lack of effort on my part.
There are not too many animals. There is no overpopulation problem. Every single animal in a shelter could be adopted tomorrow and they wouldn’t even fill HALF of the demand for pets. Haven’t you heard of the MYTH of the overpopulation problem?
The only people who want animals to die are shelter workers. They are the only ones killing the animals, they are the only ones demanding their deaths. Who else is demanding and rationalizing killing those animals? NO ONE.
If you don’t want them dead, just stop killing them. No one has to kill them. If you don’t kill them, no one else has to. If your cages in your shelter are full, do a better job at finding homes. If more pets come in than you’re capable of finding homes for, turn those people away, it’s better than killing animals to make room.
Why don’t you tell everyone dropping an animal off that you only have a 40% chance of finding a home, so 3 out of 5 times their pet is just going to be killed. Maybe that will get them to be better owners and keep their pet instead of leaving it in your killing hands.
And you are supporting the people who are making the shelters kill their animals.
No one is “making” shelters kill their animals. No one. There’s no law that says that shelters have to kill their animals to make room for new ones, and hardly any shelters are full anyway. If shelters are full despite really effective efforts to find homes, then there need to be more shelters built, not more animals killed. I doubt, though, that if there are full shelters, that it’s because of too many animals coming in, it’s most likely too few going out.
If breeders didn’t exist, then there would be a good amount of domesticated animals in this world, then MAYBE we wouldn’t have to kill them all.
Your hypothetical is really stupid. Shelters don’t create dogs, they recycle them. If there are no dogs made in the first place, there would be none to recycle.
If breeders didn’t exist there would be no domesticated animals in this world at all. Dogs as we know them would last one more doggy generation (10-15 years) and then all of the current breeding stock would be dead and all the animals from shelters would be incapable of breeding (as they are spayed and neutered). Then what?
Sure, in the very short term all the shelters would be empty, but so would most of the homes who want a pet. No more dogs, no more cats, no more horses.
Shelters and rescue play NO PART at all in the preservation of breeds. They play NO PART at all in creating healthy, well adjusted pets. Shelters and rescues don’t create, they just recycle. You are the used car salesmen of the dog world. You don’t appreciate the engineering or the art that goes into making the car, you don’t innovate, you don’t perfect, you don’t preserve, you simply want to get as many of them off your lot as possible.
Used cars are great, but buying used doesn’t reward the car maker for building a better, safer, cleaner, faster, quieter, more stylish, harder working machine. Buying new does. Buying used saves that great machine from going to waste, so it is virtue to buy used, but it’s also a virtue to buy new.
Breeders, and only breeders, are the caring people who work to create better, safer, cleaner, faster, quieter, more stylish, and harder working dogs. That is a virtue.
How dare you say that shelters and rescues have poor animals. You don’t know anything about shelters or rescues. The animals there aren’t disgusting and they aren’t unwanted, simply unlucky and dumped at shelters by uneducated or desperate people that have no other place to put their animals.
You should not confuse my words with the words of Nathan Winograd. He is an expert on shelters and rescue. Neither he nor I said anything about the shelters and rescues having “poor (quality)” or “disgusting” animals. If the animals are poor, it’s because they’ve ended up in the hands of incompetent killers. And the animals aren’t disgusting (although I’ve read enough about dirty shelters to argue otherwise) the PEOPLE who run kill shelters are disgusting. Their defeatism is disgusting. Their ineptitude is disgusting. Their philosophy is disgusting. Their mass slaughter of animals is disgusting.
But let me make some new statements that are sure to piss you off.
Shelters and rescues do have poor animals. Many are damaged goods, ruined by poor breeding and poor training by inconsiderate people. Shelters claim that such animals were “abused” but mostly it’s just poor training and lack of socialization. Those kinds of animals are not appropriate for all owners, and some people don’t care to make the additional investment in fixing those problems. Bless the people who do, but being dishonest about the POTENTIAL problems associated with used animals is dangerous.
Shelters will claim that their animals are just as good as animals you can buy from a breeder. Perhaps some are. There are perfectly good animals in shelters and there are horrible animals from breeders, the quality offered by all shelters and all breeders certainly overlaps. But you are a fool if you think that the new market and the used market are exactly or substantially the same. There ARE trade offs and there ARE concerns for buying new and buying used.
Denying so is irresponsible.
Go volunteer at a shelter, go see those wonderful faces that must perish due to the irresponsible and responsible breeders in this world. Go volunteer at a rescue, go see the amazing animals that were actually given a second chance. Breeders don’t care about the overpopulation problem- if they did they wouldn’t be breeding more.
Your first bit is an appeal to emotion fallacy. It makes no difference how wonderful or cute or lovey the animals in a shelter are. That in no way justifies or excuses the killing that inept shelters carry out.
Shelters and Rescues give animals a second change. Great. Breeders give them their FIRST chance. Great. I appreciate the good work of No Kill shelters and Breed Rescues. Your inability to appreciate the good work of breeders makes you petty and unreasonable.
You don’t know anything about shelter or rescue animals. Honestly, your post was just as bad as saying “Don’t rescue a horse from an auction, because then you are supporting slaughterhouses.” Are you even aware of how they kill animals in slaughterhouses? If not, watch this video and see.
How animals are killed has no relation to my post. Your observation about horses is a non sequitur fallacy and an appeal to pity fallacy. I have no problem with animals being killed for a good purpose. A nice cut of prime rib, a leather sofa, Elmer’s glue, medical research, scrambled eggs, McNuggets, safer shampoo, a nice pair of shoes, a warm coat are all good purposes, in my opinion. Inept shelter management is not a good purpose.
If you are at a shelter awaiting death, wouldn’t YOU want someone to come and rescue you? Or would you rather die for no good reason? GOOD people save animals from these situations. And by supporting your rescue, or shelter you are giving them donations so that they can HELP more animals.
This is again an appeal to emotion, pity, ad hominem tu quoque and a hand full of other fallacies. You’re displacing the needs and innocence of the animals in shelters with the ethics of the shelter itself. If I were a dog in a shelter I wouldn’t want the stupid shelter people to kill me just to “make room” even though there were plenty of empty cages. I wouldn’t want them to kill me because they failed to do enough to get me adopted. I wouldn’t want them to kill me because they have the misguided notion that dogs of a certain color don’t get adopted fast enough to justify keeping them alive for a little bit longer.
GOOD people run No-Kill shelters. I support No Kill shelters. I made a donation to my local No-Kill shelter for each of the dogs I sold in the name of their new owners and I donated a brand new printer to a local breed rescue to assist in their self promotion efforts (they do a photos with Santa fund raiser–brilliant idea–so I gave them a brand new color photo printer because they needed one) on behalf of the two puppies I kept.
Don’t blame the shelters, they have too many animals because of your breeders. They don’t have room in lots of shelters. They are overcrowded.
If shelters have too many animals they should build more shelters (god knows HSUS, PeTA, and the ASPCA have plenty of money to do so!) or turn animals away. If they don’t turn animals away they are not allowing for the demand for new shelters to be met.
Breeders are not the reason for too many animals. The vast majority of animals are turned in because their owners are stupid and have human problems like moving, landlord issues, and lack of funds. Breeders aren’t filling shelters. If that were the case, the majority of shelter dogs would be purebred, puppies, and all those “breeders” would quickly go out of business because it’s very expensive to breed dogs the right way and you don’t make any money if you simply abandon your puppies in a shelter.
If you’re a good Breeder people are willing to pay you good money for your good puppies because they’re worth it. Good Breeders also find good homes for their dogs, and avoid selling to people who are likely to fall into the human failings that lead to the vast majority of dogs in shelters. And the best Breeders will take their dogs back. I screened all my buyers heavily, turned away four and five buyers per puppy that didn’t fit my ideal home, and I will always take my dogs back for any reason at any time and guarantee and demand such in my contract.
The puppies that do end up in shelter are not the product of breeders, they are the product of stupid people who have OOOPS! litters between dogs that should not have ever been bred and who are likely not the same breed, with no health testing, no training, and no demonstrated merit, born to owners who are so inept that they can’t cull the unwanted puppies or find homes for them themselves.
Your post was really unreasonable and it shows me that you are uneducated about the whole breeding topic. You don’t know anything about animals, and your post surely shows it.
Next time, try to stay away from breeding posts, because you don’t know enough about it to have an opinion on the subject. I hope you do your research next time.
Julie
Help A Horse
Love an Animal. Make a Friend.
Between the two of us, it is you who are clearly uninformed. You obviously haven’t read Nathan Winograd’s book, Redemption, and since it’s all about your supposed area of expertise, I’d say that makes you look rather foolish and poorly read.
You clearly don’t know that shelters don’t have to kill. For any reason. Yet they do.
You clearly haven’t heard about the No-Kill movement that is revolutionizing the way people treat animals.
You clearly haven’t taken any time to appreciate where all those wonderful dogs and cats and horses came from and continue to come from. Kill shelters did not create the Arabian or the Paint Horse, kill shelters did not make the Labrador Retriever or the Siamese. Breeders did.
You are like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, all heart and no brain. At least that character strived to find a brain… but you, well, you’re just a straw man, much like your arguments for why you find the need to kill animals and lash out against those who say you should stop.
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And I couldn’t agree with you more about breeders (in fact, I shared that entry of yours with a few folks in need of some eye-opening).
But on shelters… I’m becoming sensitive to the same sorts of absolutist arguments you critique. Many of the poster-shelters for No-Kill aren’t achieving 100% No-Kill. My issue as a new shelter director is with this statement:
“If more pets come in than you’re capable of finding homes for, turn those people away, it’s better than killing animals to make room.”
With a County contract for animal control, we can’t turn away owner-surrenders or stop picking up strays. We don’t have to take the County contract, but someone will, and we will enable AC to be much more effective and the shelter to move toward No-Kill. There are MANY programs we can institute to move animals out so that there is space as needed, but just shutting the doors is not possible in our case, and often isn’t much of a solution anyway.
Perhaps you were still being ironic with this statement in order to make your larger point. I’m not trying to criticize, just gather up all the wisdom on this subject that I can!
I just discovered your blog and am really enjoying your posts. Very thought provoking and much appreciated.
I just discovered your blog and am really enjoying your posts. Very thought provoking and much appreciated.
I just discovered your blog and am really enjoying your posts. Very thought provoking and much appreciated.
I just discovered your blog and am really enjoying your posts. Very thought provoking and much appreciated.
I just discovered your blog and am really enjoying your posts. Very thought provoking and much appreciated.
I just discovered your blog and am really enjoying your posts. Very thought provoking and much appreciated.
Spotted Dog Farm –
You raise several really good points that are worth addressing.
First, let me remind everyone that my arguments are from an armchair, not from on the ground, in the field, on the front lines. The theory of war and the realities are often different.
Your experience working in a shelter gives you a perspective and experience that I don’t have, so in that sense I am relying on the experience and perspective of someone like Winograd who has written about it.
The line you quote is very much being snarky on my part, and as you observe turning people away is not a long term solution if it’s even a solution at all. I’m not really suggesting that as a viable solution.
The statement is a theory dagger. By that I mean that it is meant to inflict damage to Julie’s argument with the observation that if a shelter has a high enough kill rate, animals would be better off not even going near the place versus the small benefit of being admitted. It’s really a statement of how bad some shelters can be.
For instance, you might observe that for certain schools, violence has gotten so out of hand that being in the classroom is more dangerous than playing in the street. The solution isn’t to close classrooms and force kids into the streets, it’s simply a really harsh evaluation of how unsafe the classroom has become.
I’m making the same point about turning people away. In theory, if the dog’s odds of survival are better being abandoned in a field versus being admitted into a shelter, you would be better off in the field than in the shelter. That doesn’t mean we need to close shelters and promote abandonment in fields. It just shows that under twisted logic and entrenched mentalities, certain shelters are actually much worse for animals than abandonment is, and there is no excuse for that.
That’s really the point. There is no excuse at all for propping up failure, especially when the failure is so bad as to be more deadly for the animals than doing nothing at all.
Let me not confuse my statement with the oft heard complaint against “No-Kill” shelters, mainly that they are not open-admission, i.e. they do “shut their doors” to certain dogs.
Winograd discusses how this isn’t an element of his vision or of No-Kill, but my take is a bit different. This complaint is coming from open admission shelters (and they might be mandated open admission, by their contract with the city/state) who feel that they are being unfairly judged given that they are low on funds and high on intakes and since they can turn away no animals that the higher success rate of their no-kill neighbors is a biased sample.
In truth, they might be right. It might be unfair. But it’s not a long term excuse. Anyone, like yourself, who is trying to turn the big ship around is going to have to endure a lot of crap and the transition to no-kill is not overnight. It might take months to even start to implement more efficient methods and you’re not going to get a lot of help when you’re just starting because the results are obviously not going to change overnight.
A shelter with a brand new vision to become no-kill looks just like the old shelter with the kill mentality until the programs are put in place and they start working. It might take months and months to get rid of the old school people and find new ones, months to coordinate and network with new people and now programs.
If you’re a shelter director who has just taken over a shelter that has a steady influx of animals, is near capacity, and has no community support and the old benchmark was save 30%… you’re not going to get to 90% in a month… and during the time it takes you to get there, you are probably going to have to kill a lot of animals. That’s the really shitty period… you want to be better, but the reality on the ground makes it near impossible to snap your fingers and get there, especially if you have a government contract that binds what you can and can’t do… mainly, you have to take the animals in, you can’t turn them away, so if you can’t find them homes fast enough, well, there’s the blue solution.
Too bad there isn’t a national sanctuary that could “warehouse” all the animals until the shelters could make the change.
The second issue that’s interesting with your comment is the issue of government contracts. Winograd talks about this in the book and I’m sure you’d have a more educated opinion on what he says than I do.
Those contracts present a problem for everyone. Winograd recognizes them as the beginning of where it all went wrong for the SPCAs, turning them into contract killers versus animal advocates.
He also discusses how he unlinked his shelter in SF from the contractual work of the city, but still managed to get them to agree to send his shelter the animals that were to be PTS. I don’t know if all the non-lawyers out there in the country could pull this one off, nor do I think Winograd demands or suggests it as part of the movement (I could be wrong, the details of the book are fading).
But the contracts are an interesting issue and I’d like to hear more about them from you and others who have experience with that.
I was just about to give my book to a friend to read, but now I’ll have to re-read it and see what I can infer about those contracts again.
Third, you mention the difficulties in getting to 100% No-Kill.
My personal path to No-Kill didn’t come from the absolutist camps of the AR/AW struggle, or from veganism, or from some “any killing is wrong” mentality.
For some people, nothing except 100% No-Kill will ever be acceptable. This is because they are religiously against any animal killing.
That’s not the case with me. I am against the rampant inefficiency… the needless killing. But I am perfectly willing to admit that all killing isn’t needless. Some of it is going to be justified and some of it is going to happen because there will always be some amount of slop in the system… temporary inefficiencies that result in animals being put down.
I don’t particularly mind the reality of animals being killed if that’s the best solution. I simply can’t stomach that it’s become the only solution and that apparently it doesn’t have to be that way to that degree at all.
I come at it from a practical, pragmatic angle, not a absolutist angle. If it doesn’t need to be done and this Winograd guy and many others have shown that the current kill rates are way out of line with what they could be, there’s no excuse.
And by “what they could be” I don’t mean to imply that 100% is theoretically possible, therefore the only solution. Winograd suggests that 90%+ is feasible, so fine, run with that. I don’t even think I’d be horrified if 80% became the benchmark.
Sure, those numbers are arbitrary, but when you’re faced with places that can’t break 50%… it just seems way too wasteful to me.
Any way, thanks for calling me out on that statement. I’m eager to hear what you think about contracts and how they help/hurt your ability to save more animals.
A friend of blog sent this interesting link.
http://www.animallawcoalition.com/public-shelters/article/398
It documents another story from the front lines, a been-there, done-that, that confirms the hard work it takes not only to save animals, but to overcome the entrenched mentality of kill, kill, kill, and fear no-kill at all costs, lest we be accountable to not kill!
You make some good points and have a lot of patience with these copy and paste emailers. Many don’t care about shelters. They just want breeders shut down.
It’s entirely possible that I now (heart) you big time, and will be forced to stalk you.
I’m just burnt out with fighting the good fight on this topic. I was told by a breed rescue person that I’m ‘the reason Frenchies are in rescue’.
Well, no. In almost 20 years of breeding, I’ve produced less then 30 puppies, every single one of whom I can account for.
Every. Single. One.
The dogs flooding rescue come from mills, and from cheap, badly socialized European imports re sold by brokers.
Should I stop breeding happy, healthy, genetically sound pets, and let my breed be over taken by those people? Apparently, if I don’t I’m a puppy killing asshole.
So, yay for you saying what I’m too tired to say anymore.
Next time this comes up, I can just point people to your blog, rather than ranting myself into a frenzy and contemplating acts of violence.
I’d write more, but I have to get go google some stalking tips.
My question to these people who say “Buying from a breeder = killing a shelter dog” is if that is the case, what happens to the breeder puppies? They have to go somewhere as well…
Personally, I would never buy a dog from a shelter because I want to know about that animal- I don’t want any suprises. I want to know their history, any medical problems that they might have or had, I want to know any behavior issues, and I’d rather buy a pup so I can teach it what I want it to know… I wouldn’t want some Heinz 57 dog that I didn’t know anything about and could change in an instant. I realize that those sort of issues can come up with breeder-produced dogs, but the likelihood of that is much lower. I know a lot of people who feel the same way as I do as well.
What sense would there be in stopping (responsible) breeders from producing well-bred animals and who have a plan for each litter? I know of several breeders who won’t produce a litter until there is a certain number of people asking for a pup, and who have had background checks on potential buyers. What is irresponsible about that? I’d like to know if there is any sort of statistic regarding how many of THOSE dogs end up in shelters… the key is responsibility of breeders- the back-yard-breeders are problematic, who will sell to anyone who wants a dog just to make a quick buck, letting their dogs mate as they please.
Christopher, I’m also curious as to what you think about the anti-dog breeding laws that are currently being passed in Virginia?
Hello,
First off, I am glad you added my letter to your blog. I’m glad people are reading the meaningless blogs you post. Your comparison to dogs and cars really wasn’t working for me. Shelter animals aren’t used. Some are puppies/kittens newborn AT shelters. They can’t help it. I really don’t think you’ve ever been to a shelter.
I don’t know if you know this, but cars don’t have feelings. They don’t get depressed, sad, excited, angry, or scared. They are cars. Animals at shelters aren’t poor, they are unlucky. They’ve had uneducated, desperate, careless, or irresponsible owners. You can’t blame the animals for living. But you can blame the breeders for breeding- they are the ones that create the lives that die in those shelters.
I started to laugh when I read “People need to breed dogs because there is a huge demand for them.”. If it was such a high demand, shelters wouldn’t have any animals in them. You make the “demand” sound like everyone in the U.S. is dying for a dog or cat. Too bad that’s not a reality.
What do you want the shelters to do? Most shelters are doing everything they can to help the animals they have get adopted. Did you know that black dogs have a lower chance of getting adopted? That means shelters have to work twice as hard to find those black dogs a home. Not everyone wants a dog, and you’re right, the statement “Shelters and rescues do have poor animals.” did “piss me off”. Did you know that some breeders purposely dump their dogs there? March 2007 pregnant purebred German Shepherd used by a breeder, dumped at the shelter on death row. Luckily, she was rescued and had her puppies on St. Patrick’s Day. All the puppies were healthy and purebred. All of the puppies are still living happy lives, including the mother. She was in a pretty nice condition, we don’t know whether or not she was from a irresponsible or responsible, but she was from a breeder nonetheless.
Shelters are forced to kill their animals because they have no room. Some shelters keep the dogs for months because they don’t want to kill their dogs. When the shelter has to euth. a dog or cat, they don’t say “YES! TIME FOR ANOTHER DEATH!!”. Shelters don’t ENJOY putting their dogs to sleep. Due to irresponsible owners, backyard breeders, and sometimes even a reponsible breeder, the shelters have to put dogs to sleep. Unless you would rather the shelter keep all the animals alive, and start squishing them in cages together…some life that would be.
I would like to point out that not all dogs that are bred are healthy. I adopted a Samoyed from a responsible, really good breeder a while back. The dog died at age 3. Some new car that was. Later I adopted a 2yo German Shepherd from a shelter. She was sad, and wanted someone to love. She had 3 homes then ended up at the shelter- yes she was a used car. She only had about a week left. I adopted her. She’s now 10yo. That used car is still going! And while this might not always be the case, shelter dogs are as good as bred, and sometimes better.
I don’t have time to address all of your points, but I thought I’d write back anyway. I have to say on the blog, I especially liked that one comment that said “You make some good points and have a lot of patience with these copy and paste emailers. Many don’t care about shelters. They just want breeders shut down.” I wouldn’t rescue shelter animals if I didn’t care about them. I don’t want all breeders shut down, but I DO want regulations on how many animals they breed. That way some shelters animals would have more of a chance when getting adopted. Why would I want to “shut down” breeders? That would be a waste of my time because breeders will always breed and accidents do happen.
That’s all I have time for, looking forward to your response.
Julie –
I’m equally glad that you’re not a nameless critic who sends poison pen letters without taking credit or opening a dialogue.
I know we fundamentally disagree on policy and philosophy, but there’s something to be said for standing up for what you believe and taking credit for it.
I’m all for a free market of ideas. It’s why I blog link to several people who I really disagree with. Some don’t link back, and that’s their problem.
I rather like my car analogy, and I will probably lengthen it to a longer post. I am looking at the issue from the buyer’s perspective, not the product’s (dogs or cars) perspective. Of course animals are living and have souls. That has nothing to do with my observation.
I am not saying that dogs are lifeless and cookie-cutter tools like cars, what I am saying is that decision factors for purchase are comparable between large numbers of car buyers and large numbers of dog buyers. More on that later (and also why Border Collies are like Jeeps).
My analogy is comparing the mentality of the buyers and the sellers, not the products.
Some quick points:
* No one is blaming the animals. Criticizing shelters is not an attack on the animals therein. It is an attack on the mentality of the shelter establishment. Also, the suffering of the animals is no excuse for ineptitude in running shelters and re-homing those animals. Ever heard of the road to hell being paved with good intentions? Intentions mean shit if the reality of what you are doing is killing animals that don’t need to be killed, being entirely inefficient and ineffective in re-homing animals, and wasting tons of volunteer time, donor money, and good will doing so.
That establishment has used sympathy for animals to deflect and avoid criticism for their horrible ways.
There are two crimes involved with shelter animals. The crime of abandonment and the crime of being killed for space. The shelter establishment has played off of human disgust with the first crime to justify carrying out the second crime.
Ironically and sadly, the first crime results in homeless pets, the second results in dead pets. You tell me which one is worse. Even better, tell me that they both don’t need to be stopped, independently. I don’t buy that the first crime justifies the second, and if you can justify killing animals to save them, you can justify anything for any reason.
* “You can’t blame animals for living. But you can blame the breeders for breeding – they are the ones that create the lives that die in those shelters.”
– Again, you’re looking to place BLAME instead of fixing the problem.
– Blaming Breeders for dogs in shelters is as stupid as blaming car manufacturers for accidents caused by drunk drivers. You can only blame breeders for problems THEY cause. For instance, you can blame Breeders if they are breeding dogs that are unhealthy and require very expensive treatments that the buyers can’t afford. You can blame Breeders if they breed for a rare coat color simply because it’s in demand and they can charge more for it… and to do so they inbreed and cause an animal that has behavioral issues or health issues and don’t disclose this to the buyers. You can blame Breeders if they don’t socialize their animals leading to behavioral problems that get dogs dumped in shelters.
Go ahead, open season on all of that. Sadly, even though Breeders like that do exist, the dogs they create don’t even register in the top 10 reasons people get rid of their pets.
– You can blame the people who buy and ditch pets on a whim. HSUS numbers show that owners who get pets from shelters are the worst in terms of pet retention. Even puppy mill mall store clients do a better job of keeping their pets.
– You can also blame the shelters who kill animals instead of finding them homes. Nathan Winograd’s book makes a very strong case that it isn’t too many animals coming in the doors, it’s too few animals exiting that is the problem. In every shelter he’s run, he has demonstrated that it’s not a lack of demand, it’s really poor sales technique. Hint: Blaming breeders doesn’t make people want your shelter dogs any more, in fact, it makes you look defensive and jealous and insecure about the quality of your dogs.
– You can also blame shelters for further damaging their animals. I don’t think there is any excuse for allowing animals to go “cage crazy” especially when something as simple as a daily walk can prevent it. There has to be some reason that shelter adopted pets are the most likely to be dumped a second or third time back into a shelter. The same is not true of animals that were found stray or abandoned.
Don’t forget about those two groups, inept shelters and stupid buyers. Your insistence to trace the blame all the way back to breeders is a big waste of time, especially because you don’t specify the subset of “breeders” that actually plays a significant role in this process.
And as far as I’m concerned, those people aren’t breeders. People who don’t spay and neuter animals that aren’t fit to breed, unintentional mix breed litters, working dogs who aren’t spayed and neutered and whom the rancher has no interest in raising and selling puppies, and every other instance of “breeder” who creates dogs that are not wanted, can’t be sold, and are given away to friends and family or taken to the shelter.
These people are NOT Breeders any more than someone who can run is a “Runner” or anyone who can ride a bike is a “Cyclist.” Big B Breeder means having the intent, the skill, and the ethics to do justice to the breed, the puppies, and the buyers.
* There IS a huge demand for dogs. It’s a large and growing market. You’ve probably never taken Econ 101, but supply and demand are real and they’re better at gauging public opinions, wants, and needs more than any other factors, more than voting, more than surveys, and more than studies.
The fact that there is such a demand and many inept shelters are still horrible at getting pets adopted speaks even louder to their ineptitude and poor sales technique.
I had no trouble at all selling my puppies, and I wasn’t selling them cheap either. I charged a high price, but certainly a fair one, and still had plenty of interested people, enough where I could turn away anyone who didn’t have a yard, anyone who didn’t have my breed before, anyone who didn’t have the time or the interest to train and socialize, and anyone who didn’t demonstrate the willingness to care for the animal in the manner I would approve of.
I was very selective and found people who appreciated the quality of the sire and dam, people who appreciated the health testing, people who appreciated the venues where I compete with my dogs, and people who appreciated the grilling I gave them in return.
– “If it was such a high demand, shelters wouldn’t have any animals in them.”
Are shelters really appropriate gauges of demand, and is lack of demand really the reason shelters have dogs in them? In my view, the current number of dogs in a shelter is (# abandoned – # rehomed). Neither of those numbers is primarily or secondarily related to Breeders.
What about the shelters and rescues that do such a great job that they extend their services to other cities and states? When done right, shelters have no problem serving their community and even growing their sphere of influence and responsibility.
What about the shelters who actually have to (or choose to) IMPORT dogs from overseas and across our borders with Canada and especially Mexico? If we’re taking in dogs from overseas and over our borders, there can’t be much of an overpopulation problem here.
You’re also failing to appreciate that all dogs are not interchangeable. People use breed, size, age, color, gender as preference criteria. People also make choices based upon the professionalism of the salesmen. If breeders and pet stores and puppy mills and no kill shelters are all thriving at getting pets into homes and kill shelters are failing, doesn’t that tell you that something is wrong with the kill shelters?
Again, you don’t appear to have read Winograd’s book, so perhaps you’ll become informed with the lengthy passage I quoted out of it in my recent post called “Killing for a Myth.”
christopher, thanks much for the thoughtful explanation – it’s actually very comforting to have someone committed to no-kill think through some reasonable goals. the shelter is only at a 23% adoption rate, and has burned many bridges that will take some time to be re-established. it’s hard to judge what’s reasonable under the shitty circumstances vs what is justifying the shitty status quo.
i don’t have a religious objection to killing animals, so to speak, but i’m still mourning the way things are vs. the way things should be. kicking it into pragmatic mode should help in the short term.
i read winograd on the subject of county contracts and so forth. it makes sense that historically (and currently) many groups have wanted to distance themselves from animal control and public money – they get flexibility and moral high ground. but i’m holding on to the idea that bringing some private sector energy and efficiency to the clunky old AC is just what’s needed in this city to make the whole thing flow more effectively. this AC has been a weak link for ages.
there’s so much more to say, but i’m sick and tired (really). i’ll keep you posted, and like frogdogz said, thanks for fighting the good fights.
Here’s a little thought. And this is not to be defeatist or justify poor results, it’s just a reality of achieving change.
As with any paradigm shift that involves a bureaucracy, there are 100 ways for it to go wrong and stumble versus characteristics of the status quo that will aid in the transition.
Bureaucracies have institutional momentum. They are generally built to do things the old way, and turning the ship around is not an easy task.
Just look at the recent Bush Administration’s inability to revamp the State Department. He had two terms and put some of the biggest name people with the most political power in charge, and he was fundamentally unable to get the State Department (and for that matter the CIA and FBI as well) in step.
Sometimes changing the head of the beast doesn’t make the rest of the body change.
For instance, it could very well be that the old AC contracts are fundamentally incompatible with No-Kill, having the wrong benchmarks for success or having the wrong avenues for funding.
I really have to re-read Winograd’s book, but it’s telling that Winograd had his most success in SF by cutting administrative/govt ties and gaining the freedom that comes with going private. I don’t recall the specific reason, but there had to be something that wasn’t working out as well still being locked into the politics.
For example, what if you’re given the responsibility but not the power. What if you can’t fire people that need to be fired (often the downfall of bureaucracies that have tenure or union ties). What if you have to spend more time fighting the system instead of the problem.
“Religious” types have no sympathy for such considerations. PeTA or vegansexuals and their terrorist and absolutist (terrorist) tactics clearly don’t take the big picture into account. If they were on the right side of this issue, I’m sure they’d be firebombing kill shelters just like they are fire bombing research labs. Breaking in and freeing the animals lest they be killed just like they do on ranches.
Instead, you find them doing things like stealing perfectly good animals that could be adopted and killing them when there is NO demand and no contract for that.
I hope you have enough power and luck to turn things around and that you can weather the tough times now when you can see the “promised land” but still have to make the hard journey there.
Are there any stats on the “black dogs are harder to adopt” or is it perhaps a regional preference?
Admittedly, I can only speak for where I live (Southeastern PA), but I don’t see a distaste for black dogs around here — if a mutt looks like it’s mostly Lab, it seems to get adopted out pretty quick — around here, people still consider Labs the “ultimate family dog.”
I never met Pepper’s brother, who was all black, because supposedly, he was so gorgeous that at his first “Puppy Day” with the rescue’s “Meet Our Dogs” at the local feed store, everyone wanted to adopt him and he went quickly.
Now, out of the 3 puppies, Pepper was put onto PetFinder because she had the traditional BC white collar/tail and white feet with spots — you could acutually see what she looked like in the PetFinder picture. Her sister Shyanne was a stunningly beautiful, fluffy black dog, but her picture on PetFinder looked like a solid black square — you couldn’t see what she looked like at all.
So, I’m wondering in these days of PetFinder, if the difficulty of photographing black dogs is having an affect on their adoptability.
One of my gardeners is looking for a black Pom to go with her fawn Pom/long-haired Chi mix — but in checking PetFinder, she can’t find a small black dog anywhere close to us.
I’m wondering if the “black dogs can’t get adopted” is another myth that needs to be exploded — or if more salemanship will “raise all boats” and simply get more dogs adopted — maybe Tucker would have been languishing in the shelter if he hadn’t been taking to a regularly scheduled “meet and greet” where everyone could see what a great dog he was.
Dorene
I think your critique of of the zero sum theory (as it applies to dogs) is rather interesting. You might have used to many examples but your writing on it is still is worthwhile since your arguments could be applied to so many discussions.
“Blaming Breeders for dogs in shelters is as stupid as blaming car manufacturers for accidents caused by drunk drivers. You can only blame breeders for problems THEY cause”
Isn’t not putting enough thought into carefully screening buyers of puppies & having strict stipulations that the animals they produce end up back in their hands if the buyer EVER needs to rehome something one could very well blame breeders for? You obviously understand how important it is to carefully screen buyers.
ULTIMATELY, yes you could still blame the buyer for actually letting their animal end up in a shelter. You could blame them alone, they are the proximate cause of their animal’s abandonment. But how many breeders have ANY stipulation or sense of responsibility for the animals they produce once they have left the premises? If we are going to fix problems, we do indeed need to talk blame to get to where the problem is. And the problem of irresponsible breeders combined with irresponsible buyers is pretty apparent. Breeders aren’t devoid of all criticism or blame here, that would be absolutist.
One more thing regarding the general outlook you seem to have that abandonment/being left in a field may be a better outcome necessarily than death. It’s also about minimizing suffering. And a dog abandoned can suffer greatly for any number of reasons including manner of death far worse than euthanasia in a shelter.
I apologize if I have misrepresented your statements, please correct me if I am incorrect in my interpretation.