I’m not a bleeding heart type. Most people would consider me an asshole. I speak my mind, call it like I see it with no regard for PC pleasantries, and I make an effort to clean my own house before I bitch about the filth of others; that is often mistaken as arrogance, condescension, and projecting vibes of superiority. So be it.
I don’t generally share my feelings outside of my inner circle, and I find strangers and acquaintances gushing their personal feelings and business to me about as tasteful, appropriate, and interesting as them sharing their farts.
That being said, Nathan Winograd‘s Redemption has my eyes watering, my head spinning, and my stomach in knots. What a horrible disillusionment it is to find out that large and powerful organizations with names that include “Humane” and “Prevention of Cruelty” are for the most part apathetic and defeatist butchers who do little more than lecture and kill and cash checks.
Now, I realize that my disgust is just about as relevant as a bystander to a crime, hamming it up for the news cameras… when the witness is neither the victim nor the perpetrator. But this is my soap box, and as I disclosed in my first post, it goes with the territory. My interest is not all academic, though, but I don’t feel like telling a personal story right at the moment.
I was going to type of a few passages from Redemption that I wanted to share and ended up retyping almost everything. This is a book you need to read even if you’ve never been to a shelter. The book opens with the history of the animal welfare movement and documents where it all went wrong. The first two chapters alone are worth the price of admission, and here are just a few of the choice bits:
New York City offered Bergh’s ASPCA money to run the dog pound… Henry Bergh [Founder of the ASPCA] refused.
He believed that the ASPCA was a tool to champion and protect life, not to end it. He believed that its role to protect animals from people was fundamentally at odds with that of a pound. Bergh understood implicitly that animal welfare and animal control were two separate and distinct movements, each opposing the other on fundamental issues of life and death.
– Redemption, p.11
Each SPCA and humane society was a unique entity with its own funding, leadership, staff, set of rules, policies, and governing structure. In other words, no SPCA was (nor to this day is) affiliated with or gets funding from any other SPCA or humane society.
– p.12
Following his death–and contrary to Bergh’s wishes–the ASPCA capitulated and accepted a contract from New York City to run the dog pound. It was a tragic mistake. In little more than a decade, animal sheltering became the ASPCA’s primary role. By 1910, the ASPCA was doing little more than impounding dogs and cats on behalf of the city, with all but a small percentage put to death. Other SPCAs around the nation fell in line. The guaranteed source of income provided by contracts helped sway many SPCAs and humane societies to abandon their traditional platforms for advocacy and cruelty prosecutions in favor of administering dog control for cities and counties.
…
Within a decade or two, most mainstream humane societies and SPCAs did little more than kill dogs and cats.– p.13
From the ASPCA in New York City to humane societies throughout California, the twentieth century saw killing become the centerpiece of shelter strategy. It is the paradigm we live with to this very day. And while many of these organizations became very large and influential, they also became bureaucratic, with none of the zeal for reform that characterized the movement’s early founders.
– p.14
Historically, SPCAs made the tragic mistake of moving from compassionate oversight of animal control agancies to operating the majority of kill shelters. The consequences in terms of resource allocation and sacrificing a coherent moral foundation have been devastating.
– Ed Duvin, Redemption, p.15
It makes me feel disgusting that this is where we are in America today. That we’ve institutionalized killings for all the wrong reasons. And reasons matter. I’m no “lifer” who thinks that anything that moves is sacred and thus holy and untouchable. I believe in many forms of justifiable killing. I’m all for the death penalty for criminals, and I feel that War is not only the natural extension of politics, but that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Some people “need killing.”
If you eat meat or hunt, you practice justifiable killing. If you are pro-Choice, you practice justifiable killing. If you wash your hands with soap, turn on a bug lamp, use paper products, take antibiotics, step on a spider or use a wasp spray, you practice justifiable killing.
We all draw our line in the sand at a different spot, but I think all of us do so based on the belief that some killings are justified and others are not.
After reading a score of pages in Winograd’s book, I can’t help but think that few of the 130,000,000 dogs and cats that have been killed in our shelter system since I’ve been on this planet are justified.
What a way to start the week.
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This explains a lot of the history that I was not aware of. I would never guessed that a lot of animal rights groups existed around 1900. That was a time where humans were denied basic rights and abuse of workers by their employers went unchecked. If I had been alive I would have been fighting for basic human rights. I would not have distracted myself with fighting for animal protections.
And you would think that animal rights organizations would have worked to save animal lives rather than executing them. Perhaps the reason I cannot understand the ethics of our current shelters is because the ethics come from the evil times of around 1900-1920 when compassion consisted of forcefully eliminating selected humans from the gene pool. This was a policy called eugenics and it had wide support.
BINGO. Eugenics says it all, and it is still alive and well in dogs. It’s so pervasive, it’s very hard to even judge where someone is on the scale.
If you believe in breed, you believe to some degree in Eugenics. If you believe in agricultural improvement, you believe in some degree in Eugenics. If you want to marry and breed with talented hot people, you too believe in Eugenics.
And yes, you can’t deny that when humans took that to an extreme, millions and millions of people died.
Eugenics was actively practiced on humans in the United States around the 1900-1920 time period; i don’t remember exactly what years. Law enforcement would would choose a household and sterilize everyone there. It happened in some regions more than others. I heard on C-Span once that one third of the sterilizations occurred in California.
An interesting perspective of the time is that a lot of rich people thought that their success was due to genetics and the poor were just composed of weak blood lines that need to be wiped out for the betterment of the human race.