Whose fault is it anyway?

To this day, animal shelters continue to ignore their own culpability in the killing, while professing to lament it as entirely the fault of the public's failure to spay/neuter or to make lifetime commitments to their animals. Instead of embracing the No Kill philosophy, many shelters are still not sterilizing animals before adoption or providing the public with affordable alternatives. Some do not have foster care programs and do not socialize and/or rehabilitate dogs with behavior issues. Still others do not take animals offsite for adoption, have not developed partnerships with rescue groups, limit volunteerism, are not practicing trap-neuter-release for feral cats, and still retain adoption hours that make it difficult for working people or families to visit the shelter. The failure to implement these programs is mostly the result of one fact: they believe a certain level of killing is acceptable. Indeed, some would go as far as to deny they are even killing.

In March of 2006, at the largest national animal sheltering conference in the United States, a featured speaker and expert on “euthanasia” flatly denied that shelters were even killing animals:

"We are not killing [animals in shelters]. We are taking their life, we are ending their life, we are giving them a good death... but we are not killing."

To listen, click here.

When you sugarcoat the words, you do not make the act more palatable.