pet connection

I asked the No-Kill Advocacy Center’s Nathan Winograd, former director of the Tompkins County SPCA in Ithaca, New York, former director of operations for the San Francisco SPCA, and author of Redemption: The Myth of Pet Over-population and the No-Kill Revolution in America, about animal control and shelter policies that affect pet owners seeking assistance in rehoming their pets, or needing to surrender their pets, due to financial crisis, job loss, or foreclosure.

Christie Keith: Some animal control departments and shelters take a very hard line with people who are faced with losing their pets due to the foreclosure crisis, suggesting that they aren’t trying hard enough to care for their pets, and even that their financial difficulties are their own fault. Do you have any comment on that type of response?

Nathan Winograd: It is truly mean-spirited, and more excuse making and finger pointing, when the failure is theirs and theirs alone. If people have lost everything and they turn to the shelter for support in finding their animals a new home, that is the shelter’s job.

It’s like the Big Three U.S. automakers. I hate to see people out of work, and those employees certainly don’t deserve this, but who couldn’t foresee that to survive, automakers had to move towards smaller more fuel efficient cars? What allowed Honda, Toyota and the other Japanese automakers to make the switch early on and weather this fuel cost crisis, while Ford goes bankrupt? The parallels to shelter directors’ lack of strategic planning is crystal clear. And like Ford management, they have no one to blame but themselves. Certainly they have no business blaming the human and animal victims of this economic crisis. It’s nothing short of shameful.

I’ve always said that while there is some public irresponsibility, there is enough love and compassion in every community to overcome it, if the shelter harnesses and taps into that compassion. The communities who are weathering their storms of foreclosures are proving that.

But even then, some of the reasons people surrender animals may be unavoidable. And that is why shelters exist. To continue to kill animals and blame the people, when they have lost everything — their jobs, their homes, their dignity, their ability to provide the basics for their families — seems to me to be adding a great insult to injury. While I always wanted people to use the shelters I ran as a last resort, if they did not want, or could not keep, their animals, I wanted them to bring them to me, so I could give those animals the life they deserved.

Washoe County, NV, which relies heavily on tourism, is also being hard hit by foreclosures, because people aren’t going to casinos when they are having trouble meeting basic expenses. As a result, people are losing their jobs up there, and losing their homes. But lifesaving is up there compared to last year, even as they take in more cats than ever before.

The difference here is that the shelter is leaning heavily on the community for help during this challenging time, through foster care, rescue networks, adoption incentives, and good positive media relations. The result is a 90 percent save rate for dogs and cats despite taking in more animals per capita than the national average, and four times that of San Francisco.

I’ve also talked with shelter directors around the country who have built foster care networks that have allowed them to handle the overflow without resorting to killing. In fact, in New York City, impounds for dogs have risen 4 percent, and they cite foreclosures as the primary reason. But killing of dogs is actually down 4 percent from last year. Again, working closely with rescue groups has made the difference there.

I got contacted by a woman in King County, WA, who lost her home. She and her son had to move in with her mom. Rather than take the dog to the shelter, she found the dog a home. But that home fell through and the dog ended up at the shelter. She found out and immediately went over there to get the dog out. She was prepared to keep him in her car or wherever she could short of having him potentially killed. They refused to release the dog to her because she gave him up, and then killed him. Dakota should not have been killed. Even if she herself surrendered him to the shelter, he did not have to be killed.

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