Hello everybody!

VIA NATHAN WINOGRAD... A University professor asks his students the following:
Given that a local shelter kills 80% of cats, wouldn't it be more ethical if
we took all those cats and simply gave them away on the street? The students
are horrified with the proposal.

But had shelters never existed, and it was proposed that a system of abusive
death camps be opened to round up and kill millions of them, how many of us
would support such a notion? How many of us would argue that the homeless
animals for whom there was hope, whom we saw being fed, cared for and even
adopted by our neighbors, would be better off entering a facility where they
are likely to be abused, and likely to be killed?

In fact, over 150 years ago, when the impounding and killing of homeless
animals was a new concept, the great Henry Bergh, founder of the animal
protection movement in North America, fought the existence and proliferation
of such institutions, arguing that stray dogs should be left alone, once
famously and without hesitation asserting, Let us abolish the pound!

As I document in the 270 pages of Friendly Fire, U.S. shelters not only kill
millions of animals every year, but they often neglect and abuse them in the
process. How can we, as animal lovers, condone animals being placed at the
mercy of such institutions? How can we prefer such treatment to the compassion
the evidence shows they are far more likely to get from your average,
animal-loving American?

Our shelters can and should be the safe havens we want them to be. And we are
not stuck in having to choose between a No Kill nation and what we have now, a
system of death camps where animals are abused and then lose their lives by
the millions. Nor do we have to choose between giving all animals away on the
street and killing them. Nonetheless, I ask you to join me in the professor's
thought experiment. Given what we have, wouldnt our nations homeless animals
be better off if these shelters did not exist? And wouldnt the animals be
better off if we took them to populated areas and simply gave them away?

Read more at: http://www.nathanwinograd.com/?p=11272

Matt


... I am not afraid of al Qaeda, I am afraid of al Cracker.” -Chris Rock
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