The most obvious error is the failure to account for $ 874,952,500 in savings, which is a full half of the savings the report claims TNR provides.

The report lists 4 cost factors: trap/enforcement, neuter/spay, physical exams, and vaccinations.  The cost summation for these four elements is $14,874,192,500; but the report erroneously lists this as $13,999,240,000 which is nearly $875 million underreported.

There is no excuse for such a blatant error.

Now, before you get the mistaken impression that the cost figures in this study are highly accurate because of the many non-zero digits, the authors of the report are disguising how much rounding they have done by not obeying the convention of significant figures.  The budget numbers show superfluous precision.  The numbers reported imply a specificity of measurement that is much higher than the actual data gives.  You might assume that this error is introduced by multiplying a very specific cost per cat (say $148.74) by a very large but imprecise number of cats (say 100,000,000).  This is not the case. The creator of this report is using a very imprecise number for the cost per cat ($180) multiplied by an overly precise number for the feral cat population (87,495,250).  It’s unlikely that such a number can be estimated to within a million cats, let alone tens of cats as the report suggests.

So, let’s look at the data in a way that’s easier to comprehend.  Here, I simply divided the listed costs by the listed number of feral cats, and behold: the costs per cat are all perfectly even numbers rounded to the nearest $10!  This is not the work of a scientist or a statistician or even an accountant. The cost per cat for these various procedures is the one bit of data in this study that could reasonably be estimated down to the penny from empirical data. Yet it’s not.  This is sloppy math and reeks of a PR firm hired to cook up some data instead of a legit study that was commissioned by a neutral and independent source aimed at doing real analysis.

This isn’t a real study as it relies on no original research and fails to cite the most important numerical assumptions used in the formulation of its conclusion, specifically the per cat costs of the options listed, e.g. vaccinations, physical examinations, etc.  This would be the raison d’etre of such a study if it were authentic: to compare costs.  Instead, this report throws in useless citations that don’t actually provide useful data. The one citation that portends to corroborate the $15.7 billion calculation points to the HSUS website with a note that they estimate the cost of animal control at over $18.7 billion.  Not only could I not find this data at the site given, we are given no reason to believe that this HSUS number (which is the size of the NASA budget or the yearly profits of Chevron) speaks to the same costs that are listed in this report.

And let’s look at the numbers given in the report. Do they even pass the sniff test? NO!

The estimate of the number of feral cats is suspicious and unsourced.  This report lists 87.5 million but does not provide any real details on the calculation, just a lot of mumbo-jumo that was obviously stolen from another report.  For instance, why would the number of feral cats be dependent on the “unemployment rate” and if these costs are so carefully adjusted for regional variations why are such crude estimates used?  The HSUS which is sited as a source estimates “as many as 50 million feral cats in the United States,” which is a far cry from 87.5 million.  Since this report is focusing on the difference in total cost and not the much more modest difference in per cat cost, the motive here is clear: make the difference number as large as possible by reporting as many feral cats as possible.

There’s also no reason to find the total number of feral cats in the United States in such a complicated matter if the goal of the study is to do a cost comparison between three alternatives and you’re using the exact same price values for every cat in the country.  Any policy maker can choose which option on the cost per cat basis.  Saying $170 per cat versus $180 per cat just isn’t as sexy as “nearly TWO BILLION in savings!” (well nearly $875 million, but who is counting anyway?).

Let’s look at the per cat costs that this report implies. We have the trap cost of $50 per cat; since this is common among all the plans, we can ignore it for any error here effects all plans equally.

Next, we have a sheltering cost of $40 per cat, a food cost of $40 and laboratory costs of $10.  Why are we sheltering, feeding and testing cats that that are to be euthanized?  The report states that these costs are mandated in many states, yet there are no sheltering or feeding or laboratory costs worked into the TNR numbers.

These numbers are based on the inane assumption that euthanizing every feral cat will require treating every single one of them as a stray, and TNRing every cat will treat none of them as stray.

Equally preposterous is the cost basis of eradication/euthanization vs. the neuter/spay procedure.  Both are estimated to cost $40 per cat. This is preposterous.  There is not a veterinarian on the planet who could perform a spay/neuter operation for the same cost as a euthanasia. A spay is a delicate surgery requiring expensive and specialized equipment, one time use materials, and a surgeon’s skill.  Even a layperson can perform a successful euthanasia with a modicum of training.

Dr. Khuly charges the following retail prices to euthanize a dog at her Florida vet practice:

Catheter: $25
IV Sedation: $20
IV Euthanasia solution: $20

Not only is this the deluxe treatment with catheter and sedation, it’s also the price for a dog. In the comments, numerous people affirmed that the cost to euthanize a cat was significantly less than the cost for a dog given their smaller size.  The lowest prices quoted in the comments were $10 and $16 to euthanize a cat.

She also estimates that vets charge between $75 and $350 to desex a cat (again, much less than the cost for a dog):

Cat spays are priced more uniformly, since there’s not a big divide between the smallest and largest patients. Most are spayed quite young, too, which helps support this uniformity: $75 to $350 is typical.  Cat neuters adhere to an even smaller range: $50 to $150, typically.

So it’s clear that in the retail market the cost to desex a cat is significantly more than euthanasia, perhaps twice or three times the cost.

If we are really committed to euthanizing feral cat colonies instead of running them all through our shelters like lost pets, there are humane methods that can be accomplished in the field for much less than $1 per cat with no need for expensive poisons or a specially trained veterinarian or food costs or boarding costs or any of that.

The most preposterous element of this report is the “supported” package TNR cost, at just $30 per animal.  This figure supposedly relies on the assumption that all the rest of the costs will be donated.  This assumes $7.8 Billion in charity. That’s the entire peace keeping budget of the UN, that’s how much money the US Postal Service is projected to lose in 2010, and it’s also how much money Freddie Mac and CitiGroup lost in the fourth quarter of last year, and it’s the total estimated damage of the earthquake in Haiti. There is not $7.8 Billion in charity waiting for spay/neuter programs and there never will be.

There are between 40,000 and 50,000 veterinarians in the USA.  If every single one of them donated their time to spay and neuter cats, and the average procedure takes 20 minutes, and they all worked non-stop 8 hours, five days a week, it would take over 4 months to complete all the surgeries.  Good luck with that!

I’ve written kind words about TNR, No Kill, and Nathan Winograd in the past and I’m certainly willing to accept a major rethink in policy when the numbers work out.  Advocates of No-Kill do themselves no favor by using this study to bolster their cause.  Heralding such a dubious paid-to-order pseudo study as gospel in favor of No Kill opens up the entire movement to criticism and calls into question all the potential benefits of No Kill and TNR by tainting them with bogus puffery.

It’s a shame that Maddie’s Fund hired a firm to create an interactive fund raising portal instead of commissioning a legitimate study that would have illuminated the situation with good data.

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.

In my recent correspondence with a pet rescuer who has yet to embrace No-Kill, I saw firsthand the phenomenon that Nathan Winograd discusses in Redemption: that we hear so much about pet overpopulation, but has anyone seen it?

The e-mailer wrote:

[Shelters] only kill the animals because THERE ARE TOO MANY! Hello? Have you heard of the overpopulation problem?

Why yes, I’ve heard of it quite a lot. I’ve also heard extensively about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. If the modus operandi of the shelters in this country were to throw dogs off cliffs because the Easter Bunny commanded it, there’d be an uproar. If you had to trade Santa Claus a euthanized shelter dog for each present, the tragedy of “Christmas Puppies” would have a much darker and more sinister outcome.

I’ve heard a lot about “pet overpopulation,” but I’ve never seen a feral dog colony or a single dog starving in the street. I’ve never seen a dog abandoned at the dog park. Every loose and stray dog that I’ve picked up has always had a tag and an owner. I’ve never seen a pet store going out of business. The breeders I got my dogs from two decades ago are both still in the breed with occasional litters. Every breeder I met in the last few years who are active in some aspect of the dog world are actually “growing” their business. They are all expanding their activities and having more frequent litters. The only breeder I know who is “getting out of the business” was paralyzed in an accident.

Last October I became a dog breeder and just a few weeks ago I became a dog seller. I certainly didn’t get any hint that there was a Border Collie overpopulation problem. I had to go out of state for both of my last two dogs, and I sold two of the four puppies out of state. If I were just out for money I could have sold my litter five times over in one week. That’s all it took to find really good homes. One week. And I’m only catering to a very small fraction of the dog owning and buying world. People who are interested in purebred Border Collies who have had the breed before, who have a good sized yard, who won’t have to leave the animal at home for long periods of time, who are active and healthy themselves, who are willing and able to offer vet care to a high standard to the pup, who are willing to sign a contract, who agree to spay and neuter their pets or who pay a premium to keep them intact, who are willing to pay a premium for pedigreed dogs, who are willing to pay a premium for extensively health tested dogs, who are willing to put up with my interviewing them, who are interested in dog sport, etc.

I found four really excellent homes for four really excellent puppies and a handful of other A+ to A- homes that I’d gladly sell a dog to, and by that I mean make a contractual and emotional commitment to for the lifetime of that dog. Around 10 homes that would probably make excellent homes for a Border Collie but who just didn’t outshine the best homes, or excellent homes who just weren’t ready for a Border Collie now (new baby or too many very young children which would mean little time to train the dog during the crucial early months, their current dog is old and infirm and probably wouldn’t appreciate a new puppy, excellent experience with other breeds but brand new to Border Collies, too many Border Collies already, etc.). And then a slew of people who may or may not be great homes but who were either too far away, too inexperienced with dogs or Border Collies, or who were uninterested in training for dog sports for me to take a chance and who would be better served by a breeder in their area or a different breed of dog. And that doesn’t count the legions of callers who just wanted a price quote on a puppy.

In other words, if an aspiring Breeder like myself, first time breeding, who is an elitist, ultra picky about where my puppies go, selling puppies in the $450-600 price range (unregistered BCs go for $100, average price for a papered dog off of a Ranch is probably $250-300, show quality pups being sold to show homes sell for $600 and up, and rare colors like Merles go for about twice the market price for each of those classes), selling dogs in a relatively unpopulated area of the country, can find homes and put people on a waiting list in only a week, I have no evidence of a pet overpopulation problem.

The very existence of all these new designer dogs speaks volumes against a pet overpopulation problem. If there are mutts overflowing our shelters, filling the streets, and bringing about their own destruction, why are people paying $1200 for “designer” mutts? Perhaps it’s a shelter advertising problem, not a pet overpopulation problem. If shelters have too many dogs coming in, why are they importing them from overseas, and across our borders?

If I had to go out of state for my last two dogs, and so did two of my puppy buyers and many of the potentials, that speaks to a greater demand than supply, not an overpopulation problem.

I’ve licked my finger and placed it in the wind, and every indicator tells me that dogs are getting more popular, more homes are opening up their doors to them every day, and as we grow as a society our animals are becoming even more significant and being given higher status at every turn.

If we wouldn’t throw dogs off cliffs for the Easter Bunny or sacrifice puppies for Santa Claus, why are we so accepting of killing dogs for another myth that there is little evidence for: the “pet overpopulation” problem?

The Myth of Pet Overpopulation

“Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity.”

— William Shakespeare (circa 1600)

Sometimes the obvious eludes us. We are told something so often that we accept it a priori. We ignore evidence to the contrary, even overwhelming evidence. It is so because we believe it is so. And we believe it is so because we have been told it is so for as long as we can remember. Each time we say, read, or write it, we reconfirm it. It is so. It is so. It is so. But pet overpopulation is not so.

There is little reason why most people, your average animal lovers in the United States, would know pet overpopulation is a myth. The one fact that would dispel the myth is something they almost never see consistently because they do not go to shelters everyday. But animal rescuers see it. Animal activists see it. And others in sheltering do also. They see it daily, but still believe in pet overpopulation. What do they see every time they go into animal she
lters? They see empty cages. Shelters kill dogs and cats every single day, despite empty cages.

The City of Los Angeles Animal Services Department kills every day despite empty cages. A veterinarian who tried to keep more animals alive by keeping the cages full was fired in 2005, in part, due to staff complaints of “too much work.” In September 2006, the Department killed twenty-five kittens because they had a cold, despite empty cages. In Eugene, Oregon, activists noted a high percentage of empty cages at their local shelter in the summer of 2006 due to killing that shelter management blamed on pet overpopulation and lack of a cat licensing law. The Lane County Animal Regulation Authority kept all but a half dozen cat cages empty at the height of the busy season, even though it killed approximately 70 percent of cats during the last year, many of them ostensibly for “lack of space.” According to local activists, doing so makes it easier for staff to clean. In Philadelphia before a new leadership team took over later that year, I counted over seventy empty cat cages in February of 2005 on a day they were killing “for space.” These are not isolated examples. They are epidemic–and endemic–to animal control.

Empty cages mean less cleaning, less feeding, less work. Some shelter directors simply don’t care and do it for that reason. Others do it because they falsely believe that no one will adopt the animals anyway. Still others kill because they believe the cages will get full. And others–such as Tompkins County before my arrival–require a certain number of animals to be killed in the morning to make room for the new animals they expect that day–animals who might or might not come, animals who might come after those animals killed could have been adopted, lost animals who might be reclaimed, thereby opening up space without the need to kill, animals who instead could have been transferred to rescue groups or placed into foster care.

There are many reasons why shelters kill animals at this point in time, but pet overpopulation is not one of them. In the case of a small percentage of animals, the animals may be hopelessly sick or injured, or the dogs are so vicious that placing them would put adoptive families at risk. (This killing is also being challenged by sanctuaries and hospice care groups, a movement that is also growing in scale and scope and which all compassionate people must embrace). Aside from this relatively small number of cases (only seven percent of the animals in Tompkins County), shelters also kill for less merciful reasons.

They kill because they make the animals sick through sloppy cleaning and poor handling. They kill because they do not want to care for sick animals. They kill because they do not effectively use the Internet and the media to promote their pets. They kill because they think volunteers are more trouble than they are worth, even though those volunteers would help eliminate the “need” for killing. They kill because they don’t want a foster care program. They kill because they are only open for adoption when people are at work and families have their children in school. They kill because they discourage visitors with their poor customer service. They kill because they do not help people overcome problems that can reduce impounds. They kill because they refuse to work with rescue groups. They kill because they haven’t embraced TNR [Trap, Neuter, Release] for feral cats. They kill because they won’t socialize feral kittens. They kill because they don’t walk the dogs which makes the dogs so highly stressed that they become “cage crazy.” They kill them for being “cage crazy.” They kill because their shoddy tests allow them to claim that animals are “unadoptable.” They kill because their draconian laws empower them to kill.

Some kill because they are steeped in a culture of defeatism, or because they are under the thumb of regressive health or police department oversight. But they still kill. They never say, “we kill because we have accepted killing in lieu of having to put in place foster care, pet retention, volunteer TNR, public relations, and other programs.” In short, they kill because they have failed to do what is necessary to stop killing.

What allows them to continue killing without total condemnation for doing so is the religion of pet overpopulation. It is the political cover that prevents even the animal rescuers and advocates from demanding an immediate end to the whole bloody mess. And, at its core, it is an unsupportable myth. The syllogism goes as follows: shelters kill a lot of animals; shelters adopt out few of them; therefore, there are more animals than homes. Hence, there is pet overpopulation. It is as faulty a syllogism and as untrue a proposition as exists in sheltering today. But people believe it, and because they do, local governments under-fund their shelters, appoint and retain incompetent employees in animal control, and give shelter directors the carte blanche they need to kill because the problem is portrayed as insurmountable.

This also begs the question of why pet stores and commercial breeding operations (sometimes referred to as “puppy mills” or “kitten mills”) are still in business. Hobby breed enthusiasts notwithstanding (since these groups often support No Kill and assist in animal rescue), pet stores and puppy/kitten mills are motivated by profit, and they would not go into the business if homes weren’t available. In addition, the more animals dying in a given community) which traditionalists claim means lack of homes), the greater number of pet stores that sell dogs and cats (which show homes readily available). Generally, pet stores succeed when a shelter is not meeting market demand or competing effectively, and because animal lovers do not want to go into a shelter that kills the vast majority of the animals as this is usually accompanied with under-performing staff, poor customer servie, and dirty and unwelcoming facilities.

- Excerpt from Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America by Nathan J. Winograd

Today marks the one year anniversary of my enlightenment to the true state of the shelter system in this country, its sordid history, and the hope for a better future. What a profound impact the words and research of Nathan Winograd have had on my outlook towards the animal rights and animal welfare movements, my views toward breeding and owning animals, and the duty we have to do right by them in all respects.

Before I read Redemption, I had a rather negative attitude toward the breeder ethic of taking their puppies back at any time for any reason. While I agree with everything I said then, I put such a clause in the contracts I signed with the buyers of my puppies. Why? After reading how incompetent and defeatist the shelter system really is, there is no way I’d ever want an animal I love to end up in one.

I had the mistaken idea that shelters were positive upbeat places where used dogs could find new homes. I had no idea that killing was such an ingrained element of the culture, defeatism the rule not the exception, and community outreach an unfulfilled burden instead of the core mission.

I had no idea that the ASPCA had abandoned their core principles and I didn’t appreciate how antithetical the roles of animal advocacy and animal control really are.

I got everything I wanted out of the book, and more.

Give yourself a gift this Chrismas and pick up a copy of Redemption. You won’t be the same again.

You see, when I read his name combined with his work in San Francisco, I immediately thought that he must be related to Terry Winograd, one of the best Computer Science professors I had at Stanford. After all, how many Winograds can there be in the bay area, let alone on the Stanford campus; they must be related especially since they have more than a passing resemblance to each other. If Nathan is anything like what I assume is his father, then he must be an engaging speaker with a soft style that belies a razor sharp intellect.

I read his online material about feral cat populations at Stanford and was rather impressed that despite being accosted on several occasions by the mutant black squirrels on campus, I never once recall even the slightest annoyance by a cat, despite there (supposedly) being a sizable feral population on campus. If they’re still there, they are unobtrusive and seemingly innocuous. I don’t recall ever seeing a mouse or a rat, and can’t say I ever smelled urine or stepped in cat feces. If you’d argue that cats would be detrimental to bird populations, the plethora of owls, hummers, and abundant species in between would suggest otherwise and the Stanford Cat Network makes a pretty convincing argument that saving cats is not endangering birds.

According to Winograd, a feral cat population that numbered between 500 and 1,500 in 1990 is today a community of 50 spayed and neutered cats. At a sustained level of 4-10% of what it was at its peak, without the unneeded killing of a single cat, the Stanford Cat Network would have to be called a resounding success.

Given the reviews and a decent bet that he can write as well as his father, I bought Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America.

I wanted to write at least one post before I read it, giving my honest guess about what the message might be and to document my comparative ignorance of the shelter situation in the U.S.

To me, most of the rhetoric coming out of the various animal crusader movements is off-putting and obnoxious, filled with slogans that don’t make sense and are frankly offensive. The “buy a puppy and kill a shelter dog” rhetoric pretty much just disgusts me, and removed any desire for me to learn more.

But I have a feeling that all of that is about to change, and nothing is better for the growth of the intellect than to be proven wrong or enlightened to a topic you’re in the dark about. Everyone seems to agree that Winograd is not your average bleeding heart gimme-gimme type, and on all accounts he seems to be a potential for a “true genius” that is being harped on by the “confederacy of dunces” according to my favorite of theories.

Several warning flags alerted me that I might not enjoy this book as much as others have. First, the liberal use of the word “compassion” all over the cover. Often, this is a political code word used by lefties to justify pork projects that don’t work and create a culture of dependency and by righties to abandon fiscal conservatism and libertarian ideals with their own vote-buying pet projects. Both parties use the word to whitewash what really amounts to either a nanny state or fascist interference into the economy or individuals’ social lives. Given that Winograd is an ex-lawyer from the Bay Area, there is a 95% chance he’s a lefty… maybe he’s a socialist anti-capitalist too.

“Compassion” is an attack word: people never use it to describe themselves, yet they often site its lack in others as justification for otherwise unpopular or nonsensical redistribution programs. When a socialist with a bleeding-heart’s compassion outgrows their own means to provide relief, they almost universally demand that other people who “have” aren’t doing enough for the “have nots.” They combine this with the anti-democratic notion that their power to influence wealth should be proportional to how much they “care,” not how much they have.

In essence, this is the same mentality as the protest movement. Protesting isn’t democratic, it’s the exact opposite. It’s using tactics to magnify your voice louder than it really is and to drown out the voices of the larger opposition. It’s tyranny of the minority. Obstructing commerce, trespassing, destruction of private property, inciting a riot, and vandalism are terrorist techniques, not democracy. They might be justified, but that doesn’t make them democratic. This is the game plan of wackos like PeTA.

So why is all this relevant to Redemption? Well, this is the milieu from which I would suspect on first glance that Wi
nograd is coming from. Guilt by association, so to speak.

But there are other things that make me feel that this book and Winograd’s argument might be different. First, the Stanford Cat Network is run “in agreement with, but not funded by” Stanford University. Interesting, a cause that doesn’t have its hands in the deepest pockets it can find.

Second, Terry Winograd is such a captivating professor because he combines two distant disciplines, computer science and modalities of human interaction, to great effect. His book and class is on Human Computer Interaction and all the issues regarding how we translate our organic wants and needs into digital processes and likewise how we interpret output from lifeless and predetermined systems with our social lens was a highlight of my undergrad experience. He managed to take the most interesting aspects of computers and human behavior and show how they relate.

Winograds are probably people who don’t think along trite two dimensional models. From what others are saying, Winograd is advocating a new path, a different direction, and just maybe he has found a way to combine the best of two different fields just like his father.

Third, I like people who come out with seemingly outlandish theories that defy all “conventional wisdom.” These people are the ones that push us forward and who find elegant solutions to complex problems that have evaded solution by generations of “experts.” These people are typically visionaries and their detractors are the confederacy of dunces who would rather wallow in the dark than face the light. Results based assessments versus theory base assessments are always superior (what actually works versus what sounds good).

Fourth, the first sentence of his book, “the Myth of Pet Overpopulation” rings very true with what I have observed to be true. I don’t believe there is a pet overpopulation problem and have yet to be shown any convincing evidence that there is one. The notion that there are homeless pets in no way demonstrates an overpopulation problem, just as the existence of homeless people doesn’t in any way support the notion of human overpopulation. It took me years of planning and months of intensive searching to find my two current Border Collies and I had to seek out of my home state before I found either of them. I have yet to see packs of wild feral dogs anywhere other than the third world countries I’ve visited, and the dog friendly places like dog parks and superstores are busy, but hardly overcrowded with too many dogs.

I’ve seen documentaries on Puppy Mills on TV, but the very existence of a low cost provider speaks to a burgeoning market, not an over population problem. Signs of overpopulation would be too many dogs over running every venue for dog activity, tons of stray an feral dogs wandering around and setting up wild colonies. News reports of farmers complaining about excessive predation on their flocks of chickens, sheep, and other small game. There would be more breeders than you could care to shake a stick at and they’d all be selling pups at dirt cheap prices. Mall pet stores wouldn’t be the low end of the market, they’d be comparatively high class compared to the masses of wild born puppies and get-rich-quick schemers, and the US would be exporting the excess puppies instead of importing them.

People wouldn’t be paying a premium for pet food, vet care, and dog toys. Nor would the standard of living of today’s pets be higher than ever before in history.

People who speak of human overpopulation are welcome to sterilize or even kill themselves to solve the problem. Few have the, erm, balls. But plenty of zealots have latched on to the eco-terrorist/green/vegan/environmental band wagon that says humans are a plague and pets are too, but since we can’t kill humans, killing pets will have to do.

That’s my greatest hope for this book, that Winograd uses facts and logic and data instead of zealotry and dogma, that he makes me want to support his movement instead of shun it, and that he acknowledges the facts as they are and gives credit where it’s due instead of the slactivist tactic of blaming someone else and then bitching for them to fix it.

Here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, over fifty million household dogs live in the United States. Europe houses an estimated thirty-five million. … If I add Canadian dogs to these populations, I get one hundred million household dogs in the industrial West.

In the United States each year, households produce 3,700,000 puppies. Hobby breeders produce another two million, and half a million are produced by commercial breeders for department store and other retail sales. That is a turnover of 6,200,000 dogs a year. If the population is not going up or down, then 6,200,000 dogs die every year. That is a 12 percent annual mortality rate, which for a species with a life span of a little over ten years is a low mortality rate in the wild.

In the United states, four million of these dogs spend part of a year in animal shelters. For 2,400,000 of them it is the last stop. Almost 5 percent of our companion animals are dogs nobody wants, and they get “put to sleep.” Culled. Again, disaster for the individual dog. Some of this culling may be related to competition between people and dogs for food resources. People soon decide they can’t afford the dog, and turn them over to humane societies

- Dogs, Lorna Coppinger

Is a five percent disposal rate really that much of a concern? The bleeding heart loud mouths would have us believe that there is an “overpopulation” problem and that it is an epidemic. So much so that they demand for (near)universal sterilization laws, moral outrage at hobby breeders, misplaced hatred of purebreds and the people who buy them.

Nathan Winograd has shown again and again that many dogs that are killed don’t need to be, but the onus is on shitty shelters that don’t get the job done, mostly because they are defeatist from the outset. Huge strides have already been made in sterilizing pets and in lowering the percent of pets that are abandoned. But this number will never be zero.

Will the bleeding heart loud mouths not be satisfied until it is, as in never? Will they be like the Christians and the Jews waiting for the next coming of their prophet/savior? And will they, in their growing frustration as their dogma fails to deliver success year after year, become even more preachy and unreasonable?

Evidence suggests that they will. Here’s a comment posted recently that is filled with references to PeTA’s veritable Book of Revelations (which documents the Pet Overpopulation Armageddon we are now living in according to their dogma):

Of course Joe Biden killed a dog [by buying a puppy instead of rescuing from a shelter]. Are you all delusional? Can you not count? Joe could have adopted a dog at a shelter or from a rescuer and opened up another spot for one of the millions of dogs dumped at shelters by people, and saved a dog from being euthanized due to over crowding. There is NO justification for breeding a dog when millions of adoptable dogs are put to death. All 3 of my rescue dogs were well behaved and lived to 15 + years old, so don’t tell me about damaged, sick dogs. Most of the people I know with “pure breeds” encounter health problems at age 7 or 8 and behavioral problems earlier due to inbreeding. The whole notion of breeding a specific type of dog is archaic.

- Comment by Janice — December 12, 2008 @ 6:41 pm

Janice is a perfect example of a bleeding heart loud mouth with a savior complex. Since feeding her ego with 3 rescue dogs wasn’t sufficient (and how could it be, rescuing a dog does nothing except save that dog) to even influence the dog abandonment issue, she’s now grasping at totalitarian measures to bring about her “my bleeding heart is more important than your freedom, so I’m going to force my uniformed blather down your throat even though what I demand you do has never been effective at accomplishing the goals I want” religion.

I’ve already debunked the “buy a dog, kill a dog” fallacy. (Myth of Christmas Puppies, Parroting PeTA, Buy From a Breeder, and Adopt a PeTA pet and kill 248 more). This is a displacement tactic used by PeTA to blame someone else because they don’t want to take responsibility for killing 97% of the animals they take in. Have no doubt, it’s the shelters who kill the dogs, and in almost all cases, it’s not because they have to. It’s because they want to. Thinking you’re opening up a spot by capitulating to the kill shelters is like appeasing a terrorist. You think you’re saving lives but you’re really just making a deal with evil. You are allowing them to operate and continue their extortion.

Would you buy drugs from your neighborhood street dealer simply to take that small amount of product off the market?

As I’ve shown (Garbage In, Garbage Out), the major causes of abandoned dogs are HUMAN problems, not problems with the dogs themselves and not problems with purchased dogs or purebred dogs or even pet store dogs, or dogs given as pets.

So given that humans are imperfect and will always be such, what do we expect the natural rate of culling should be?

In economics, there is a concept called the “natural rate of unemployment.”

The natural rate of unemployment is the healthy unemployment rate that will always occur in an economy, unless it is severely overheated. Some level of unemployment results from:

1. Frictional unemployment that comes from job turnover,
2. Structural unemployment that is caused by a mis-match between job skills and job availability,
3. Unemployment caused by minimum wages laws and unions.

In short, it’s economist speak for “the unemployed will always be with us” and observationally, economists place the rate at between 4% and 6%.

Given that, do you really think that the bleeding heart loud mouths are justified in breathing their fire and spitting their venom on the rest of us? I think their outrage is entirely disproportionate to the size of the problem. I think the targets of their rage are also inappropriate and thus their rage is ineffectual. They aren’t going to change the kill rate by even one dog by putting breeders out of business, ending the concept of purebred dogs or even reaching saturation levels of desexing dogs.

The first way to cut the rate is to tackle the issues that actually cause people to relinquish dogs: Moving, landlord issues, cost of pet maintenance, no time for pets, inadequate facilities, too many pets at home, pet illness, personal problems, biting, no homes for litter mates.

The second way to cut the rate is to improve the ef
ficiency of shelter placement programs: adopt the entire no-kill paradigm.

The e-mailer wrote:

[Shelters] only kill the animals because THERE ARE TOO MANY! Hello? Have you heard of the overpopulation problem?

Why yes, I’ve heard of it quite a lot. I’ve also heard extensively about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. If the modus operandi of the shelters in this country were to throw dogs off cliffs because the Easter Bunny commanded it, there’d be an uproar. If you had to trade Santa Claus a euthanized shelter dog for each present, the tragedy of “Christmas Puppies” would have a much darker and more sinister outcome.

I’ve heard a lot about “pet overpopulation,” but I’ve never seen a feral dog colony or a single dog starving in the street. I’ve never seen a dog abandoned at the dog park. Every loose and stray dog that I’ve picked up has always had a tag and an owner. I’ve never seen a pet store going out of business. The breeders I got my dogs from two decades ago are both still in the breed with occasional litters. Every breeder I met in the last few years who are active in some aspect of the dog world are actually “growing” their business. They are all expanding their activities and having more frequent litters. The only breeder I know who is “getting out of the business” was paralyzed in an accident.

Last October I became a dog breeder and just a few weeks ago I became a dog seller. I certainly didn’t get any hint that there was a Border Collie overpopulation problem. I had to go out of state for both of my last two dogs, and I sold two of the four puppies out of state. If I were just out for money I could have sold my litter five times over in one week. That’s all it took to find really good homes. One week. And I’m only catering to a very small fraction of the dog owning and buying world. People who are interested in purebred Border Collies who have had the breed before, who have a good sized yard, who won’t have to leave the animal at home for long periods of time, who are active and healthy themselves, who are willing and able to offer vet care to a high standard to the pup, who are willing to sign a contract, who agree to spay and neuter their pets or who pay a premium to keep them intact, who are willing to pay a premium for pedigreed dogs, who are willing to pay a premium for extensively health tested dogs, who are willing to put up with my interviewing them, who are interested in dog sport, etc.

I found four really excellent homes for four really excellent puppies and a handful of other A+ to A- homes that I’d gladly sell a dog to, and by that I mean make a contractual and emotional commitment to for the lifetime of that dog. Around 10 homes that would probably make excellent homes for a Border Collie but who just didn’t outshine the best homes, or excellent homes who just weren’t ready for a Border Collie now (new baby or too many very young children which would mean little time to train the dog during the crucial early months, their current dog is old and infirm and probably wouldn’t appreciate a new puppy, excellent experience with other breeds but brand new to Border Collies, too many Border Collies already, etc.). And then a slew of people who may or may not be great homes but who were either too far away, too inexperienced with dogs or Border Collies, or who were uninterested in training for dog sports for me to take a chance and who would be better served by a breeder in their area or a different breed of dog. And that doesn’t count the legions of callers who just wanted a price quote on a puppy.

In other words, if an aspiring Breeder like myself, first time breeding, who is an elitist, ultra picky about where my puppies go, selling puppies in the $450-600 price range (unregistered BCs go for $100, average price for a papered dog off of a Ranch is probably $250-300, show quality pups being sold to show homes sell for $600 and up, and rare colors like Merles go for about twice the market price for each of those classes), selling dogs in a relatively unpopulated area of the country, can find homes and put people on a waiting list in only a week, I have no evidence of a pet overpopulation problem.

The very existence of all these new designer dogs speaks volumes against a pet overpopulation problem. If there are mutts overflowing our shelters, filling the streets, and bringing about their own destruction, why are people paying $1200 for “designer” mutts? Perhaps it’s a shelter advertising problem, not a pet overpopulation problem. If shelters have too many dogs coming in, why are they importing them from overseas, and across our borders?

If I had to go out of state for my last two dogs, and so did two of my puppy buyers and many of the potentials, that speaks to a greater demand than supply, not an overpopulation problem.

I’ve licked my finger and placed it in the wind, and every indicator tells me that dogs are getting more popular, more homes are opening up their doors to them every day, and as we grow as a society our animals are becoming even more significant and being given higher status at every turn.

If we wouldn’t throw dogs off cliffs for the Easter Bunny or sacrifice puppies for Santa Claus, why are we so accepting of killing dogs for another myth that there is little evidence for: the “pet overpopulation” problem?

The Myth of Pet Overpopulation

“Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity.”

— William Shakespeare (circa 1600)

Sometimes the obvious eludes us. We are told something so often that we accept it a priori. We ignore evidence to the contrary, even overwhelming evidence. It is so because we believe it is so. And we believe it is so because we have been told it is so for as long as we can remember. Each time we say, read, or write it, we reconfirm it. It is so. It is so. It is so. But pet overpopulation is not so.

There is little reason why most people, your average animal lovers in the United States, would know pet overpopulation is a myth. The one fact that would dispel the myth is something they almost never see consistently because they do not go to shelters everyday. But animal rescuers see it. Animal activists see it. And others in sheltering do also. They see it daily, but still believe in pet overpopulation. What do they see every time they go into animal shelters? They see empty cages. Shelters kill dogs and cats every single day, despite empty cages.

The City of Los Angeles Animal Services Department kills every day despite empty cages. A veterinarian who tried to keep more animals alive by keeping the cages full was fired in 2005, in part, due to staff complaints of “too much work.” In September 2006, the Department killed twenty-five kittens because they had a cold, despite empty cages. In Eugene, Oregon, activists noted a high percentage of empty cages at their local shelter in the summer of 2006 due to killing that shelter management blamed on pet overpopulation and lack of a cat licensing law. The Lane County Animal Regulation Authority kept all but a half dozen cat cages empty at the height of the busy season, even though it killed approximately 70 percent of cats during the last year, many of them ostensibly for “lack of space.” According to local activists, doing so makes it easier for staff to clean. In Philadelphia before a new leadership team took over later that year, I counted over seventy empty cat cages in February of 2005 on a day they were killing “for space.” These are not isolated examples. They are epidemic–and endemic–to animal control.

Empty cages mean less cleaning, less feeding, less work. Some shelter directors simply don’t care and do it for that reason. Others do it because they falsely believe that no one will adopt the animals anyway. Still others kill because they believe the cages will get full. And others–such as Tompkins County before my arrival–require a certain number of animals to be killed in the morning to make room for the new animals they expect that day–animals who might or might not come, animals who might come after those animals killed could have been adopted, lost animals who might be reclaimed, thereby opening up space without the need to kill, animals who instead could have been transferred to rescue groups or placed into foster care.

There are many reasons why shelters kill animals at this point in time, but pet overpopulation is not one of them. In the case of a small percentage of animals, the animals may be hopelessly sick or injured, or the dogs are so vicious that placing them would put adoptive families at risk. (This killing is also being challenged by sanctuaries and hospice care groups, a movement that is also growing in scale and scope and which all compassionate people must embrace). Aside from this relatively small number of cases (only seven percent of the animals in Tompkins County), shelters also kill for less merciful reasons.

They kill because they make the animals sick through sloppy cleaning and poor handling. They kill because they do not want to care for sick animals. They kill because they do not effectively use the Internet and the media to promote their pets. They kill because they think volunteers are more trouble than they are worth, even though those volunteers would help eliminate the “need” for killing. They kill because they don’t want a foster care program. They kill because they are only open for adoption when people are at work and families have their children in school. They kill because they discourage visitors with their poor customer service. They kill because they do not help people overcome problems that can reduce impounds. They kill because they refuse to work with rescue groups. They kill because they haven’t embraced TNR [Trap, Neuter, Release] for feral cats. They kill because they won’t socialize feral kittens. They kill because they don’t walk the dogs which makes the dogs so highly stressed that they become “cage crazy.” They kill them for being “cage crazy.” They kill because their shoddy tests allow them to claim that animals are “unadoptable.” They kill because their draconian laws empower them to kill.

Some kill because they are steeped in a culture of defeatism, or because they are under the thumb of regressive health or police department oversight. But they still kill. They never say, “we kill because we have accepted killing in lieu of having to put in place foster care, pet retention, volunteer TNR, public relations, and other programs.” In short, they kill because they have failed to do what is necessary to stop killing.

What allows them to continue killing without total condemnation for doing so is the religion of pet overpopulation. It is the political cover that prevents even the animal rescuers and advocates from demanding an immediate end to the whole bloody mess. And, at its core, it is an unsupportable myth. The syllogism goes as follows: shelters kill a lot of animals; shelters adopt out few of them; therefore, there are more animals than homes. Hence, there is pet overpopulation. It is as faulty a syllogism and as untrue a proposition as exists in sheltering today. But people believe it, and because they do, local governments under-fund their shelters, appoint and retain incompetent employees in animal control, and give shelter directors the carte blanche they need to kill because the problem is portrayed as insurmountable.

This also begs the question of why pet stores and commercial breeding operations (sometimes referred to as “puppy mills” or “kitten mills”) are still in business. Hobby breed enthusiasts notwithstanding (since these groups often support No Kill and assist in animal rescue), pet stores and puppy/kitten mills are motivated by profit, and they would not go into the business if homes weren’t available. In addition, the more animals dying in a given community) which traditionalists claim means lack of homes), the greater number of pet stores that sell dogs and cats (which show homes readily available). Generally, pet stores succeed when a shelter is not meeting market demand or competing effectively, and because animal lovers do not want to go into a shelter that kills the vast majority of the animals as this is usually accompanied with under-performing staff, poor customer servie, and dirty and unwelcoming facilities.

- Excerpt from Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America by Nathan J. Winograd

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.

http://www.helpahorsenow.org

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.

The author of the article quotes Nathan Winograd in the story to expound upon the upscaling of the shelter and the changing notions of what a shelter should be.

While lavish shelters have been criticized by some as Taj Mahals for pets, they’re the standard for future shelters, experts said.

Millions of dollars are going to building and renovating shelters from coast to coast as communities recognize the disconnect between the way people feel about their pets and how orphaned animals are housed at traditional shelters, said Nathan Winograd, a national shelter expert in California.

“It’s Americans that are forcing shelters to be more progressive,” he said.

New-style shelters Winograd ran in San Francisco and Ithaca, N.Y., saw adoptions increase by an average of 32 percent and the animals’ time there cut in half the first year, he said.

She even wraps up the article with a quote from another No Kill pioneer:

“The animals do the job,” said Richard Avanzino, 65, who pioneered progressive shelters a decade ago, “but they have to have the opportunity.”

Do you find anything at all objectionable about these two quotes? Are they out of place? Grand standing? Taking credit for other’s work? Gratuitous?

Well, apparently if you’re an acolyte for the old religion and its two greatest churches (the HSUS and the ASPCA), such benign quotes are blasphemy:

Rob

Plymouth, MA
Wednesday Dec 5

Nathan Winograd, as usual, is promoting himself and not being honest. He is NOT a “shelter expert.” He has no business even being mentioned in this. His shelter in Ithaca NY is FAILING right now. Overcrowding, turning animals away, losing community support. Nathan promotes himself, and the no-kill religion, but fails to mention no kill’s failures, some of which he is responsible for. Why not interview actual experts that truly get things done, like ASPCA? Nathan Winograd needs to worry about the problems he created in places like Ithaca, not promoting himself. And he needs to worry about the rise in horrific “no kill” hoarders and fake sanctuaries that are warehousing and abusing animals in the name of no-kill.

What PAWS has accomplished has nothing to do with Winograd. Shame on him for trying to promote himself by using this organization.

Does one single thing Rob from Massachusetts says hold water? Is Winograd promoting himself? Not that I can see. The reporter obviously found him or found quotes from him. He certainly wasn’t there signing copies of his book and autographing the puppies that got adopted.

If talking about your success rate can only be construed as irrelevant self promotion if you’re a critic who is jealous of the good that has been done that you or your idols have failed to replicate.

Is Winograd not being honest? Rob conveniently forgets to outline what exactly Winograd is lying about. Or perhaps his rant about the current status of the Ithaca shelter is supposed to be a dirty little secret that Winograd is lying about. Rob apparently has special knowledge of Ithaca’s failings that aren’t known to the rest of us. I certainly can’t find anything on the Internet that would lead me to believe that the sky is falling in Ithaca.

Oh, but we do have accusations that Winograd is CAUSING problems, like hoarders. Oh please, these people have mental conditions that existed long before Winograd and the words No-Kill ever came into being. That they justify their behavior by stealing labels that don’t describe them has nothing to do with Winograd or the real No Kill movement.

Winograd and the greater No Kill movement don’t facilitate these people, they don’t offer them aid or comfort, and they in no way encourage their activity. And I have yet to see one shred of evidence that such hoarders are on the “rise” as a result of the growing popularity of No Kill.

In fact, as far as justification for hoarding goes, I would guess that most of these people would justify their hoarding because kill shelters kill A LOT of animals. If there is a thriving No Kill shelter in your community, wouldn’t that remove all incentive for a sane and rational person to hoard? People justify hoarding to prevent kill shelters from killing. Hoarding has nothing to do with No Kill.

If hoarding has any causal link to the shelter system it is most assuredly in response to the horror that traditional shelters kill so many animals for such paltry reasons. It seems to me that the flunkies who ran the old concentration camp shelters are simply merging the motives of two of their enemies. The hoarders who existed before No Kill and the revolutionaries who finally broke down the wall and exposed institutionalized animal genocide for what it is.

Take a gander at the venom spewed against Winograd at Britanica.com’s page describing Animal Shelters and the No Kill Movement:

Shelly Williams Says:
January 15th, 2008 at 12:42 pm

This is the most misinformed load of crap based on personal opinion I have ever read in regards to national animal sheltering issues. I can’t believe Encyclopedia Britannica would allow such garbage on it’s website! Did the writer read anything besides Nathan’s sham of a book? Communities need to support their local animal shelters and help them do a better job, not condemn them for handling one of the most difficult issues existing in our country.

Oh, so there it is. The kill-to-be-kind God is dead and the old priesthood doesn’t want to take any criticism for their years of loyal servitude. In fact, they’d prefer it if everything just continued as it did before. Apparently they are still waiting for their messiah, and people who perform miracles like Winograd and Avanzino must be evil mages sent to tempt them away from worshiping their cruel, wrathful, vengeful, and uncaring God.

Winograd is no messiah, rather he is a visionary. He doesn’t claim to possess special or unattainable powers, he simply delivers results the likes of which have never been seen. He doesn’t demand our worship and he has given away every secret he has. He’s not here to atone and die for our sins, or likewise demand that our dogs and cats do so. That is the method of the old testament of sheltering. Sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice. Suffer the plagues of excess animals and know that they are punishment for your sins.

Cleanse thy conscience in blood.

Winograd is not a messiah because he asks us to take nothing on faith and we don’t have to wait until the afterlife to enjoy the fruits of conversion. The No Kill message is in the here and now, it is at our finger tips, we could do it tomorrow and we don’t need divine guidance to get there. We just need to stop killing.

Stop the killing.

That’s it.

So to Rob and Shelly: Shut the fuck up and stop the killing. Evey moment you waste demanding that we all sing kum-bay-a and save egos instead of animals, find jobs for bureaucrats instead of find homes for pets, soothe the guilt of the Humane Societies and SPCAs for their decades of selling out their morals and killing because it was easy and convenient and kept the checks rolling in, is a moment wasted.

The HSs and the SPCAs are more worried about covering their asses and coming out of the Revolution with their reputation and budgets still intact than they are about getting results. The ones that aren’t have already moved on and don’t have idiots like you trying to prop them up.

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.

They kill because they make the animals sick through sloppy cleaning and poor handling. They kill because they do not want to care for sick animals. They kill because they do not effectively use the Internet and the media to promote their pets. They kill because they think volunteers are more trouble than they are worth, even though those volunteers would help eliminate the “need” for killing. They kill because they don’t want a foster care program. They kill because they are only open for adoption when people are at work and families have their children in school. They kill because they discourage visitors with their poor customer service. They kill because they do not help people overcome problems that can reduce impounds. They kill because they refuse to work with rescue groups. They kill because they haven’t embraced TNR [Trap, Neuter, Release] for feral cats. They kill because they won’t socialize feral kittens. They kill because they don’t walk the dogs which makes the dogs so highly stressed that they become “cage crazy.” They kill them for being “cage crazy.” They kill because their shoddy tests allow them to claim that animals are “unadoptable.” They kill because their draconian laws empower them to kill.

Some kill because they are steeped in a culture of defeatism, or because they are under the thumb of regressive health or police department oversight. But they still kill. They never say, “we kill because we have accepted killing in lieu of having to put in place foster care, pet retention, volunteer TNR, public relations, and other programs.” In short, they kill because they have failed to do what is necessary to stop killing.

What allows them to continue killing without total condemnation for doing so is the religion of pet overpopulation. It is the political cover that prevents even the animal rescuers and advocates from demanding an immediate end to the whole bloody mess. And, at its core, it is an unsupportable myth. The syllogism goes as follows: shelters kill a lot of animals; shelters adopt out few of them; therefore, there are more animals than homes. Hence, there is pet overpopulation.

- Nathan Winograd, Redemption p. 157-58

Don’t support these people with your donations. Even if you take one of those poor dogs home, you’re just allowing them to continue to kill thousands upon thousands of other dogs with the money they gain from your “adoption fee.” Rescuing a dog from such a situation is just as bad as “rescuing” a dog from a puppy mill by buying your dog at the mall. You might be removing one dog from a bad situation, but your actions are just enabling many many more to meet a worse fate.

Don’t support killing, buy a puppy from someone who has hand raised that dog in their home. Someone who has a name, a face, and a home that you can visit. Someone who loves the sire and dam and who has trained them to display their abilities and documented their physical and genetic health with x-ray exams and DNA analysis and by researching the pedigrees to discover other warning signs for diseases that don’t have tests.

Reward that person for being a resource to you before and after your puppy purchase. Reward that person for having a phone number that you can call with all of your seemingly stupid, but vital, questions. Reward that person for preserving the health and abilities of your breed for one more generation so that your children and their children can enjoy that breed’s companionship. Reward that person for their puppy contract that allows you and them to clearly express what is expected of both parties, and what needs to be done if you need to relinquish your animal.

Reward that person for socializing the parents and the puppies, mitigating the chances that small behavioral problems lead to animal abandonment. Reward that person for allowing you to see the dam and possibly the sire so you can judge what your puppy might grow up to be like. Reward that person for raising an animal in a home, just like the one where it will spend the rest of its happy life with you.

This is the propaganda put out by eco-terrorist radical groups like PeTA who at their core are against all animal companions: