Why NOT No Kill?
By Patricia Collier
A child visiting with his mother last week asked me why places that euthanize animals are called "humane" societies. I mumbled something about caring for unwanted animals and sometimes an animal was too sick to be adopted out, but after the child went home, I replayed my answer in my head. It dawned on me that it's 2009 and there are indeed still places out there that call themselves "humane" society "shelters" who do routinely kill animals and do it behind closed doors. This is my Journey Journal, if you will, of the steps I took to find out why.
Why NOT No KILL? That's the first question I asked myself. If we can send people up in space on an almost-routine basis, if we can take someone's heart out of their body and replace it with a heart from someone else's body, if we can design buildings that reach over 100 floors into the sky, we should certainly be able to rescue, rehabiliate and rehome the ____ or so healthy, unwanted animals that end up at the bottom of the "humane" chain in the state of Florida.
10/12/09
I wrote to the Humane Society of the United States (hsus.org)and asked if they could provide me with an estimate of the total number of humane society shelters in the state of Florida and, of those, how many are currently NO KILL. I also asked if they could provide me with an estimate of the costs involved in caring for an animal per day in a shelter setting (to include the costs of food, utilities, and staff, vet services, etc?) vs. the costs of euthanasia (to include costs for equipment, drugs, staff, etc.) I am currently awaiting a reply.
On the same day, I did a quick Google search and found some great stats, dated June, 2009, from the Florida Department of Corrections, which revealed it costs an average of $55, or a little over $20,000 a year, to keep a convicted criminal warm or cool, dry, clean, fed, healthy, etc.
(http://www.dc.state.fl.us/pub/statsbrief/cost.html)
It costs substantially more, $99.12 a day, for the same inmate while they're at what the State calls a "Reception Center." This is where the inmates are evaluated, given medical, psychological, vocational and education tests. This would be comparable to the initial evaluations done on animals when taken to a shelter. Except...according to someone who works at a kill facility...I have learned animals are given "disposition" tests and an accompanying rating number reflective of their adoptability. These ratings translate into the number of days the shelter will house the animal before killing them.
Yet, there are at least ___ "no kill" facilities out there that do not care about the animal's adoptability and committ to caring for that animal its entire life. We do it for pedaphiles and rapists. Why can't we do it for innocent animals, whose only crimes have been being born into a cold world, tossed aside like cracker crumbs, and snared into the back of a truck to be transported to a hell no better than their previous existence?
To me, it's a moral issue. Other than animals that are so sick or injured that prolonging their lives would be torturous, or animals that have been so abused that severe and irreparable organic harm has been done, there's simply no excuses left for our society to be routinely killing animals.
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