I took this from Facebook and shortened it some. Be warned: it is a chilling story. If you haven’t got time or money for a pet, don’t get one. But if you do have, please consider adopting one – or another one. (From my St. Thomas Dog Blog, Apr. 10, 2011.)
You can’t keep your pet? Really? – By A Shelter Director (Everywhere)
Edited by MuttShack.org (Click title for the entire Facebook post)
As a shelter manager, I am going to share a view from the inside. Maybe if you saw the life drain from a few sad, lost, confused eyes, you would stop flagging the ads on craigslist and help these animals find homes. That puppy you just bought will most likely end up in my shelter when it’s not a cute little puppy anymore.
They always tell me “We just don’t want to have to stress about finding a place for her. We know she’ll get adopted, she’s a good dog.” There’s a 90% chance she won’t leave the shelter alive. Purebred or not! About 25% of “owner surrenders” or “strays” that come into a shelter are purebred dogs.
72 hours
Your pet has 72 hours to find a new family from the moment you drop it off. Sometimes a little longer if the shelter isn’t full and your dog stays completely healthy. If it sniffles, it dies.
Your pet will be confined to a small run/kennel in a room with other barking or crying animals. It will have to relieve itself where it eats and sleeps. It will be depressed and it will cry constantly for the family that abandoned it. If your pet is lucky, I will have enough volunteers in that day to take him/her for a walk. If I don’t, your pet won’t get any attention besides having a bowl of food slid under the kennel door and the waste sprayed out of its pen with a high-powered hose.
Big, black or Bully breed
If your dog is big, black or any of the “Bully” breeds (pit bull, rottie, mastiff, etc.) it was pretty much dead when you walked it through the front door. Those dogs just don’t get adopted, no matter how ‘sweet’ or ‘well behaved’ they are.
If your dog doesn’t get adopted within its 72 hours and the shelter is full, it will be destroyed. If the shelter isn’t full and your dog is good enough and of a desirable enough breed it may get a stay of execution, but not for long.
Most dogs get very kennel protective after about a week and are destroyed for showing aggression. Even the sweetest dogs will turn in this environment. If your pet makes it over all of those hurdles, chances are it will get kennel cough or an upper respiratory infection and will be destroyed because the shelter gets paid a fee to euthanize each animal and making money is better than spending money to take this animal to the vet.
Euthanasia 101
Here’s a little euthanasia 101 for those of you that have never witnessed a perfectly healthy, scared animal being “put-down”. First, your pet will be taken from its kennel on a leash. They always look like they think they are going for a walk happy, wagging their tails. Until they get to “The Room”, every one of them freaks out and puts on the brakes when we get to the door. It must smell like death or they can feel the sad souls that are left in there. It’s strange, but it happens with every one of them.
Your dog or cat will be restrained, held down by 1 or 2 shelter workers depending on the size and how freaked out they are. Then a shelter worker who we call a euthanasia tech (not a vet) finds a vein in the front leg and injects a lethal dose of the “pink stuff”. Hopefully your pet doesn’t panic and jerk. I’ve seen the needles tear out of a leg and been covered with the resulting blood and been deafened by the yelps and screams. They all don’t just “go to sleep”, sometimes they spasm for a while, gasp for air and defecate on themselves.
No money for tranquilizers
Shelters are trying to make money to pay employees and don’t forget the board of directors needs to be paid too. So we don’t spend our funds to tranquilize the animal before injecting them with the lethal drug. We just put the burning lethal drug in the vein and let them suffer until dead. If it were not a “making money issue” and we had a licensed vet do this procedure, the animal would be sedated and then euthanized. But this would cost more so we do not follow what is right for the animal. We just follow what is the fastest way we can make a dollar. Even if it takes our employee 50 pokes with a needle and 3 hours to get the vein, that is what we do. Making money is the issue here not losing money.
Stacked like firewood
When it all ends, your pet’s corpse will be stacked like firewood in a large freezer with all of the other animals that were killed. What happens next? Cremated? Taken to the dump? Rendered into pet food? Or used for the schools to dissect and experiment on? You’ll never know and it probably won’t even cross your mind. It was just an animal and you can always buy another one, right?
I hate my job
I deal with this every day. I hate my job; I hate that it exists and I hate that it will always be there unless people make some changes. Do your homework, and know exactly what you are getting into before getting a pet.
9-11 million die per year
Animal shelters are an easy way out when you get tired of your dog or cat. Between 9 and 11 MILLION animals die every year in shelters and only you can stop it. I just hope I maybe changed one person’s mind about taking their dog to a shelter, a humane society, or buying a dog. Please repost this to at least one other craiglist in another city/state. Let’s see if we can get this all around the US and have an impact.
