This is something one of my volunteers wrote years ago. It’s never been published anywhere.

I recently rediscovered it buried in my files and wondered about it. Post-Maddie’s Fund, I’m wondering if overly-complicated adoption procedures are still an issue with rescues and shelters.

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While the overpopulation of unwanted pets in America is indeed a reality with harrowing consequences, the practice of touting it as the root cause of the suffering of companion animals is flawed.

“There are too many pets and not enough homes”, the long-suffering cry of the animal welfare community, is more of a sentiment or unified belief system rather than a fact.

True, there are too many pets being housed and eventually euthanized by understaffed, poorly funded, overpopulated shelters and humane societies - and these facilities generally cite “lack of homes” as the leading cause of death of the animals they shelter each year.

But the idea that there aren’t enough homes for them all is one that makes little sense when we look at how few people ever even attempt to adopt from a humane group or shelter compared to how many are acquiring pets elsewhere.

Of the estimated 110-120 million pets owned at one time in this country, most reports reveal that only about 5-9% were adopted from a shelter or humane group. The majority of pets are acquired through other sources such as professional breeders, backyard breeders, pet shops, and free-to-good-home advertisements.

Over the years, the animal welfare community has generated many slogans, catchy phrases, and mottos that are meant to urge the public to choose the “Adoption Option” and to avoid acquiring pets from these other, less humane sources.

In the overall fight to end the suffering of companion animals, adoption programs have become very important to most welfare groups, humane societies, and shelters. Providing pets to the public serves to help us increase awareness, improve shelter image, provide great opportunities for face-to-face education, enforce sterilization, improve volunteer and staff morale, provide long term support to the pet and new pet owner, and, of course, provide good homes for pets that might otherwise have been abused, neglected, strayed, or euthanized.

Since the animal welfare community is the ONLY source of pet acquisition in America that is funded, and therefore morally obligated, to provide humane education, guidance, and ongoing support to new pet owners, it makes little sense for us to complain about the lack of these services by other pet sources.

While it is a nice sentiment to say that they SHOULD, breeders, pet shops, and free-to-good-home advertisers are not obligated to provide any humane services. In fact, aside from obeying a few animal protection laws, they are not obligated to do much at all for the pets in their care. These pet sources are merely in the business of meeting the demand of the public with a supply of pets - to the tune of many million new pet acquisitions every year.

As frustrating as it is to acknowledge, the mass production of pets is big business in America. And, like most big business, it generates an astounding amount of greed and waste.

We, the animal welfare community, have taken on the responsibility of trying to check the greed, clean up the waste, and generate a kinder, more humane attitude toward all companion animals - this is OUR business and it is unique to us.

Collectively, we are the custodians of several billion dollars a year given to us by the public to help us accomplish our jobs; we receive a vast amount of media attention, free services, grant opportunities, and government financing, and we enjoy overall acceptance and support of our programs by the general public. The animal welfare movement too, is big business in America.

Why then are we still killing over 60% of our supply of adoptable pets while failing to meet the demand of the millions of families each year bringing a new pet into their home?

Some people working in shelters and with rescue groups might say that “adoptions are not all we do“ and many believe that other programs, such as humane education, are most effective in changing the overall attitude toward companion animals. While humane education is indeed imperative to true and lasting change, what better audience do we have than the potential adopter?

Since we are the only source of pets that regularly promises to provide humane education and ongoing support for the new pet owner, to take the pet back into our care if the human/animal relationship fails, to provide spay/neuter surgery for the pet, and to teach people to be good pet guardians, then we should be loath to ever miss the opportunity to provide a potential adopter with a pet!

It’s not the fact that more adoptions would equal less demand for other pets being bred and sold so much as the fact that, if we do our jobs well, the animals adopted from us are not likely to ever reproduce, suffer from cruelty or neglect or ever see the inside of a shelter.

Since lack of new pet owner education, lack of spay/neuter, lack of support, and lack of alternatives when and if the human/animal relationship fails are all the biggest contributors to pet relinquishment, then it seems that where and how people get their pets is a very important, if not the most important issue.

Rather than the frustrating and futile practice of angrily placing blame on the breeders, backyard breeders, free-to-good-home advertisers, and pet shops, wouldn’t we better serve the pet population by actually COMPETING with these sources?

In order to do more adoptions (therefore preventing more pet relinquishment), we must try to understand the family or individual that is looking to bring a pet into their home. And we must reject any ideas we may have that a potential adopter is anything more or less than a “consumer.”

People want pets and people get pets. Social class, income, age, gender, or level of education have no real bearing on the type of people who keep pets. While it is a widespread sentiment within the animal welfare community that “owning a pet is a privilege - not a right” it is nothing more than sentiment. In fact, pretty much any free person in this country, regardless of how much we may wish they didn’t, has a right to go out and get themselves a pet.

So, the “consumer”, or the potential adopter, can most simply be understood as - a person who has a right to get themselves a pet, is on a mission to get themselves a pet, and most likely WILL get themselves a pet - regardless of how qualified they may or may not be to actually care for that pet.

They set out looking for a pet and are given a multitude of options; breeders, newspaper ads, pet shops, the shelter, a humane society, etc. Keeping in mind that shelters are already notorious for being “too depressing” of a place for most families to visit, and shelters and rescue groups typically keep very short, inconvenient hours of operation, coupled with the fact that most everyone knows that adopting a pet from one of these places is “saving a life”, “being responsible, “helping a homeless animal”, and all the other things we’ve taught the public over the years….any person who walks into an adoption center to get a new pet has already proven that they want to do the right thing.

When someone walks into an adoption center to adopt a pet - we have just beat out our competition (and we must admit, our competition will likely have better hours, cheaper prices, friendlier customer service, and/or more selection than us!). If that person leaves our adoption center empty handed, we have served only to push them back out into the mass-market of breeders, free ads, and pet shops- the very places we plead with people to avoid - the very places that we know are generating the biggest contributing factors of pet abandonment.

So, when we fail to provide that adopter with a pet, either directly (a refused adoption application) or indirectly (lack of selection of the types of pets people want, poor customer service, overly complicated adoption procedures, etc.), we should be quite sure that there was no hope whatsoever of teaching that person to be a responsible pet guardian.

To define “responsible pet guardian”, we must first understand the basic needs of companion animals. Food, water, shelter, companionship, and safety are really all any pet needs to thrive in a home. Of course, many unfortunate pets in this country are deprived of these basic needs and that is why cruelty laws, the justice system, animal control, and preventative humane education programs are so critical to our cause.

However, these laws and programs are generally set forth as a necessity to prevent the ill-intentioned criminal or the truly incompetent person from causing harm to an innocent pet. Since responsibility must be taught, especially in the case of caring for a living creature, a truly irresponsible pet guardian would be someone who knowingly, and with intent, failed to provide a pet with it’s basic needs - someone who knew how to be responsible but chose to act irresponsibly.

If pet overpopulation and/or the suffering of unwanted pets is to be blamed on “irresponsible pet owners”, and if the animal welfare community is the only group out there funded to educate those people to be more responsible, then we must take responsibility ourselves; each and every pet that suffers and dies as a result of an irresponsible person, is a pet we failed.

Whether we failed to prevent that pet’s birth, educate his owner, provide his family with support, or rescue him from the hands of a true abuser, it was our responsibility, our business, to have used our donations, our resources, and our energy to prevent that tragedy.

How can we take money from the public to educate the public only to turn around and blame the public for being uneducated?

Only when we truly take responsibility for the fact that we are the only ones who have stood up, voiced a concern, collected a donation, and made a promise will we understand that, with that responsibility, will come many successes and failures.

The animal welfare community has yet to ever acknowledge, much less show any remorse for, its failure rate - instead we have gathered around in hot pockets of anger, furtively calculating the staggering death statistics of all the pets we kill. We produce facts and figures, come up with catchy slogans, hold fund raisers, make emotional, compelling statements on TV, and print glossy brochures that blame everybody else but ourselves for the fact that we kill most of the pets we are funded to protect.

Meanwhile, the rest of America is quietly busy breeding, selling, and acquiring pets from everywhere else but us.

Why? Because we, the animal lovers, the most pet-compassionate of us all, have chosen to take jobs and volunteer positions that would expose us daily to the absolute worst of human behavior, greed, waste, and dispassionate attitudes. We love animals and we hate people who hurt animals. But can we fathom our own power, not only to help, but to actually harm the very population of animals we dedicate our lives and careers to protect?

In a knee-jerk reaction to save the pets in our care from the atrocities we see every day, we’ve grouped together the public and separated ourselves from them. We’ve somehow concluded that the only power we have is, not to educate people, rather to prevent uneducated people from acquiring our pets.

We’ve forgotten that we are in the business of creating responsible pet guardians, not finding them. We are not funded to be in the business of providing nice pets to nice people - that is not even a luxury we can afford.

If given a choice, maybe we should even let the “nice, responsible, good pet guardians” go get their pets from the places that do not provide humane services…after all, good, responsible people don’t need those services. Let us, the animal welfare community, focus on learning to recognize an irresponsible, uneducated person, lure that person into our adoption facility, find them a pet, and then use all of our resources to make that person a responsible pet guardian!

“What stands in the way of achieving no-kill?” he asks.

How about putting in that list a shelter industry that chooses banker’s hours over hours that people keep, that prefers clean, empty cages over messy pets waiting for homes, and has resentment for “having to kill” on behalf of the communities they “serve”? How about putting in that list a shelter industry that conducts the blame game as usual, instead of embracing innovative programs that put pets into homes? Read through the comments on the Newsweek piece, and you see tons of anger and resentment channelled into a desire to “punish” the public, with legal neutering mandates if at all possible. (Geez, you get the vibe from these people that they’d neuter people, too, given half a chance.)

How about leading, instead of blaming? How about enforcing the laws we have instead of shoving new ones that are misguided at best — and hidden animal-rights domestic animal extinction plans at worst — down our throats?

And how about not patronizing animal-lovers by labeling no kill as “a noble goal” with the suggestion that such nobility is unattainable?

The HSUS can put its might and money into making this happen. They cleaned up shelters in the first place — and kudos for that! — helping to put animal-control guidelines into place in many a hell-hole.

But that was then, this is now. The numbers of animals needing homes annually has dropped by millions — yes, millions! — in the last couple of decades. New policies and strategies need to close the gap, and there are plenty of homes available if you can reach them. Running efficient killing shops and blaming the public isn’t enough anymore.

Walk the talk, Mr. Pacelle. It’s time to get off the fence.

He criticizes the Newsweek article for oversimplying things and spinning the truth and yet this is exactly how I interpret his quote above.

If you want to soundbite it: What stands in the way of achieving no-kill is major organizations like HSUS refusing to put their political and financial capabilities 100% behind it.