PETA & Franzen Fact Check 'No-Kill' FAIL & Kansas City Animal Lovers Should Take Note

A worthwhile consideration of a controversial topic was recently sent to TKC . . . Here's an alternative perspective on the guiding philosophy of the KC Pet Project that might need to be adjusted . . . Check-it:

The Verdict Is In: ‘No-Kill’ Is Failing Animals and Communities

In this new article by novelist Jonathan Franzen, which just came out in The New Yorker and is lifting the veil on how “no-kill” policies at animal shelters—even public shelters that are funded by taxpayer dollars—are causing cats and dogs to suffer.

As Franzen explains, many shelters are prioritizing “save rates” over “spay rates”—they’re focused on keeping animals out of their euthanasia statistics even if it means animals die badly out on the streets, but many of them are not doing nearly enough—if anything—to prevent animals from being born into a world already bursting at the seams with unwanted ones, and ending up homeless in the first place. Some facilities are warehousing animals (namely, dogs), and turning others away, with many refusing to accept cats altogether, instead condemning cats to be abandoned on the streets as “community” cats—a particularly egregious policy, given a new study revealing that cats allowed to roam outdoors terrorize, maim and kill more than 2,000 species of animals. And while these slow-kill policies leave the most vulnerable animals with nowhere to go, leading to abandoned dogs and cats not just reproducing and creating even more unwanted animals but also suffering and/or dying of starvation, trauma, disease, or abuse on the streets, facilities with “no-kill” policies enjoy positive PR by advertising a misleading at best and dishonest at worst “90% save rate”—and the open-admission shelters that never refuse admission to animals in need (and are therefore most in need of funding) are vilified.

The solution here is for shelters to remember the meaning of the word “shelter” and keep their doors open to all animals in need—and for communities and individuals to focus on prevention, meaning spay/neuter requirements and bans on breeding and selling animals in pet stores, as Los Angeles, with its notoriously troubled shelter system, is now preparing to do. 

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