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Q We live in a rural area and are working towards getting a shelter built. We have no humane society here at this time in this three-county area of about 60,000 people. There has never been a spay-neuter program or feral cat Trap-Neuter-Return program of any kind here. We have no idea how many animals to figure on getting in when we get our shelter open, but we know it will be a lot! Especially cats. How can we even begin to try to be a no-kill shelter, knowing we will be inundated as soon as we open our doors? The thought of having to euthanise all these animals makes us sick! Any suggestions?
A Under these circumstances, building a shelter is a completely counterproductive measure. It is senseless, mindless, and literally the very last thing you ought to be doing--and you should not even think about doing it until and unless someone leaves you the land and money to do it. Until then, putting money into shelter-building makes less sense than saturating hundred-dollar bills in tuna oil and using them for feral cat bait.
The most successful approach to preventing rural dog and cat overpopulation that ANIMAL PEOPLE has ever seen is the "No-kill, no-shelter" concept pioneered in Costa Rica by Alex Valverde, DVM, Gerardo Vicente, DVM, and Christine Crawford, founder of the McKee Project.
Everything they do in Costa Rica can and should be done in rural parts of the U.S. and Canada as well, for all the same reasons.
Vicente, who is a policy advisor to the Costa Rican Veterinary Licensing Board and is the former board president, is very proud that Costa Rica has had no animal control shelters in many years, has closed and demolished those it once had long ago, and does not want or need any more.
As Vicente points out, shelters of any kind take a lot of money to build and run. Even the U.S., spending $2 billion a year on animal sheltering, between public and non-profit investment, does not yet have complete shelter coverage of every community.
After more than a century of energetic shelter-building, half of the rural counties in the U.S. still have no shelter, public or private--and shelter-building has meanwhile proved to be a completely ineffective response to the problems associated with homeless dogs and cats.
All that shelter-building does is divert funding and public attention away from solving the dog and cat overpopulation problem, while creating the illusion that institutions are taking care of it.
Enough shelter space can never be built to contain every dog and cat without a home, as long as dogs and cats breed freely. Nor is it possible to lastingly reduce dog and cat overpopulation by killing the surplus. The U.S. amply demonstrated that during the 20th century, catching and killing more dogs and cats in shelters, several times over, than the probable sum of all the dog and cat purges undertaken during all of the Middle Ages and modern China combined.
No matter how many dogs and cats are killed, as the Italian mathematician Fibonacci demonstrated nearly 600 years ago, the fertile remainder can always breed rapidly up to the carrying capacity of the habitat, somewhere between becoming a public nuisance and suffering starvation.
Poor areas, rural areas, and developing nations, Vicente emphasizes, cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the rich.
Animal shelters will always become death camps and slaughterhouses, Vicente points out, if dog and cat reproduction is not controlled BEFORE the shelters are built.
If the population is controlled, the role of animal control shelters in housing the relatively few animals who require quarantine or special care could be done as efficiently by shelter-less non-profit humane societies, using fostering networks.
This is most especially true of rural areas, where the distances to be traveled to use a centralized shelter tend to become an incentive to dumping animals instead. Rather than spending money to run a shelter, animal rescuers need to set up a network which enables the nearest rescuer to collect any animal who is being surrendered, and then deliver the animal to the most appropriate foster home. The coordinating office needs no more than a desk, a telephone, Internet service, and the fundraising capacity to help the fostering volunteers cover their costs, including the costs of sterilizing and vaccinating the incoming animals.
Adoption placements can be arranged in four different ways:
1. By using offsite adoption programs
2. By arranging frequent offsite adoption events around the community.
3. By using a web site with photos to help advertise the availability of the animals.
4. By setting up a working agreement with a nearby big-city shelter which can place any overflow of puppies and kittens and otherwise easily adoptable animals. These days many and perhaps most big-city shelters have a shortage of highly adoptable animals, but rural organizations are still getting lots of them. As a result, literally hundreds of rural organizations are now successfully providing animals to big-city shelters, who are better situated to compete against pet shops and puppy mills in placing animals in homes.
If you really want to solve the homeless dog and cat problem, eliminate strays, and eliminate all the problems that go with them, you need to start by providing low-cost or free sterilization and vaccination.
In a rural area, you do not even need a fixed-site clinic, which is often a necessity in inner cities. Neither do you need a mobile clinic, in most cases, although having one can be handy.
What you need are veterinarians who participate in your program as partners and are appropriately compensated, including with subsidies for all the low-cost sterilizations and vaccinations that they do for people you send to them.
You also need a transportation pool to relay animals to and from the clinic for the rural elderly, disabled, and poor people whose access to transportation may be limited.
Being able to provide feral cat trapping help is also a good idea. If you provide the traps and the trappers, you can be sure that the job is done right and that no animals are harmed. If you merely loan out traps, or provide no practical help at all, mistakes will be made.
Vets, wheels, and feral cat-catchers are the necessities.
Later you can add an adoption center if the region seems likely to support one, and a care-for-life sanctuary if you inherit the money to do it.
If your sterilization and vaccination program is successful, meanwhile, you will never need conventional animal control shelters and so-called full-service humane societies that kill most of the animals they purport to "rescue."
You need a good low-cost sterilization and vaccination program first, because whether or not pet owners are able to afford sterilization and vaccination, or are responsible enough to do it, it still needs to be done, for the benefit of the entire community, including the animals.
Shelters evolved from pounds during the late 19th century, and the whole purpose of pounds was to prevent animals from running at large.
We have better technology for doing that now. We have not really needed pounds in 80 years, when the conventional sterilization surgical procedures were first approved as safe by the American Veterinary Medical Association, soon after the principle of preventing rabies through vaccination was approved. Building a pound these days makes about as much sense as building a crystal set in order to listen to the radio or buying a manual typewriter to handle high-volume correspondence.
You may encounter great resistance from some directions to the idea of "rewarding" so-called "irresponsible" petkeepers by sterilizing and vaccinating their animals for them, instead of trying to find some way to punish them.
It is often said that these people should not have pets. That may be true, but such arguments are irrelevant to reality.
The fact is, people in need of help to get their pets sterilized do have dogs and cats, and those animals do need sterilization and vaccination. Merely impounding the animals does not serve the need or solve the problem.
Ignoring that need is like ignoring that your neighbor's house is on fire just because you happen to know that he smokes in bed. Whether or not your neighbor is a fool, the fire must be put out to reduce possible harm to your own house.
After you have a successful sterilization and vaccination program, establishing a pet adoption center might make sense, depending on the traffic patterns of your region, because in order to find homes for adoptable dogs and cats, you need to have them in a convenient location, where it is easy for them to attract people's attention, where the animals can be happy and healthy and comfortable, and where they can get whatever training they may need to succeed in a home while they await adoption.
None of that can be done effectively in dreary rows of steel-and-cement cages out beside the town dump. Placing these animals in good homes requires treating them as if they have value. Treat them as if they have value, and people will want them--and the way you treat animals, as humane representatives, will be perceived as the appropriate standard of pet care.
Let me briefly point out here that dogs do not go kennel-crazy from being in a shelter too long. Rather, they go kennel-crazy because conventional animal shelter design couldn't be better designed if they were put together by mad scientists whose sole object was to drive dogs insane--and, by the way, if you have in mind building any kind of so-called "shelter" that resembles the usual, you are not just doing something that will be counterproductive. You are also committing an offense against the animals' well-being, for which the penalty ought to be five days of living on bread and water in the typical "shelter" cell.
The standard cement-floored, cement-and-chain-link walled, tin-roofed dog run is an atrocity, which thoughtlessly evolved from the layout of horse stalls in the Middle Ages. Humane societies copied the manner in which hunting packs were kept, in spare horse stalls, without giving the slightest consideration to the behavioral differences between dogs and horses.
Dogs need compatible companions, they need room to run, they need security from being stared at from a close distance by strange dogs, they need outdoor air and light, and they need to be able to dig.
Give a dog what a dog needs, and it is very easy to keep dogs happy and healthy. Deprive a dog of any of these things, and you will soon have sick and despairing dogs.
Teach a community to deprive a dog of these things, and you will have a community full of maladjusted dogs being surrendered to shelters or dumped on the street--which may be exactly what you already have, partly because of the past 125 years of humane societies setting a piss-poor example.
Cats need to be able to climb--and they prefer a quiet environment. There is no animal easier to care for than a cat. Even great apes in zoos often keep pet cats successfully--and so has at least one now deceased grizzly bear.
Unfortunately, great apes and the occasional bear in zoos often have a better sense of what a cat needs than humane society shelter directors.
Too often I visit humane societies full of nervous, panic-stricken, and diseased cats, who are kept in cells the size of a microwave oven, where they have to listen to 100 kennel-crazed dogs barking all night and all day.
That is not a humane way to keep a cat; it is a kitty torture chamber, and if the ancient Egyptians were right that human beings will face a cat on Judgement Day, many a shelter director may be passing a very hot eternity.
If you keep dogs and cats in a facility that looks like a jail and smells like a cesspool, dogs and cats all over town will be treated like prisoners on a chain-gang, because the condition of your facility sends the message that you think this is okay.
If you treat dogs and cats as if they are honored guests, the community standards will rise to your standard. This too has been proved time and again.
Finally, after you have a very effective outreach sterilization and vaccination program, and after you have an adoption program that places every animal who can be quickly placed, and after the resources become available as result of your inspirational effect on your community, it is worthwhile to start a care-for-life sanctuary as a backup to the rest of your system, for the animals who cannot be adopted out, because many people will not surrender a dog or cat to a humane organization if they think the animal might be killed. Instead, they will abandon the animal somewhere "to give him a chance," or "give her a chance." That animal may then contribute to the breeding population of street dogs and feral cats.
People give up pets for all sorts of reasons. Whether or not we think the reasons are "valid," giving up pets is a fact of life which must be accommodated. It must be understood that many of these pets are given up not because they are not loved, but because desperate people feel they have no choice: they have lost their job, lost a home, an animal has bitten or scratched a child, the spouse hates the animal, the landlord is threatening to evict them, or someone has died and the pet-keeper is so depressed he or she just can't cope.
If these people feel the pet is going to either find a home or be well looked after at a sanctuary, they will bring the animal into the adoption-and-care network. The animal will not end up having "accidental" litters out on the streets, further contributing to the homeless animal problem.
Animal control agencies that can respond immediately to nuisance animal complaints and act as a dog-and-cat lost-and-found are very nice to have--but they are not what it takes to end pet overpopulation and shelter killing.
Full-service humane societies that can provide emergency veterinary care, do humane education, do animal rescue, and investigate cruelty complaints are also nice to have.
Yet they are also not what it takes to end pet overpopulation and shelter killing.
A community placing the first emphasis on developing animal control agencies and full-service humane societies, in short, is just plain going in the wrong direction. It needs to slam on the brakes, turn around, and go back to what really needs to be done.
Go the right way, and you can get to no-kill animal control while solving all the community animal problems very quickly.
Go the wrong way, and you will spend the next century repeating all the same dim-witted mistakes that the U.S. humane community made throughout the last century.
[Merritt Clifton, editor of ANIMAL PEOPLE since 1992, first wrote extensively about animal welfare issues as a rural Quebec newspaper reporter, 1977-1990.]
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on November 1st, we received a call from another neighbour telling us that someone was trapping our cats in the school yard. This action was started on a Saturday so we couldn't contact anyone to verify who had hired them. This man went into the neighbourhood, dressed in battle fatigues (we nicknamed him Rambo), and riled up the neighbours. He convinced several to put traps in their back yards. He yelled at us when we went outside, saying that the school board had hired him to get rid of the cats. I couldn't believe that the school board, especially a Catholic one, would choose such a drastic, violent and cruel solution to a problem that could have easily been rectified with a simple phone call to me. In the meantime, "Rambo" had already trapped three cats; one kitten on antibiotics, one that we had just paid to have spayed, and another kitten. One couple (ironically, the same couple who had brought us 4 starving kittens), was the most aggressive of the neighbours. We were absolutely distraught. I locked the remaining cats in the shed in order to protect them from getting trapped. At the time, we did not know who this trapper was, and where he was bringing the cats. My daughter would lock me into the shed twice a day to feed them and clean litter pans. On November 3rd, I fed the cats later than usual, and was stunned to hear voices outside my shed. Three teenage boys were breaking into it! As soon as they unlocked it, I jumped out and screamed at them to get off my property. My daughter came out and talked to them, and they admitted that the trapper had hired them to open my shed so that he could trap the cats. He had offered them $10.00 per cat (he later told the police that the boys had offered to do it for cigarette money- no charges were laid).
for Jazzpurr Cats