If Only in My Dreams

I hope one Christmas to be thinking about all the shelter pets in this country who are waiting for their future families to find them because we don't kill homeless pets anymore, we adopt them out. But that won't be this year.

From North Carolina:

When Brunswick County Health Department officials began considering whether to buy a new gas chamber to euthanize animals the county couldn't adopt, they knew they wanted one large enough for the shelter's largest animal cages.

A small chamber, Health Director Don Yousey said, would mean that at least some of the animals would have to be forced into the enclosure with a choke stick, a situation that would have been unnecessarily traumatic for both the condemned animal and the person charged with ending its life.

[...]

The need to euthanize animals because there are no homes for them is an unpleasant reality, but a reality nevertheless.

The "unpleasant reality" is that shelter pets are needlessly killed due to a widespread myth of pet overpopulation.

The Brunswick County animal shelter, for instance, takes in about 6,000 dogs and cats a year, Yousey said. Of those, about 5,000 must be euthanized because they are sick, injured, vicious, feral or just can't find humans to adopt them before their waiting time runs out.

That's an 83% kill rate. I believe Brunswick Co has forfeited its right to call its pet killing facility a "shelter".

The shelter uses both lethal injection and carbon monoxide poisoning, depending on the age of the animal and its physical condition as well as the potential safety risks to shelter workers. Puppies and kittens don't die well in gas chambers, and animals with respiratory problems might suffer needlessly there, so they get lethal injections, Yousey said.

Puppies and kittens don't die well in gas chambers. How annoying of them.

"A lot of animals we get down there, they are terrified with you being around, just because you're human," said David Stanley, the health department's director of environmental services[...]

Maybe they're terrified of you because you're not human. Maybe they are frightened by the stench of death in your slaughterhouse "shelter". Maybe they have seen their neighbors get dragged by "choke sticks" into the gas chamber and heard them scream as they struggle against the carbon monoxide.

"It's a horrible job," he said. "It's a thankless job. [Shelter workers] hate it."

You want to be thanked? Try directing your resources toward saving the pets you are supposed to be sheltering and not toward buying a super sized gas chamber.

We are a humane society of pet lovers. Join us.