PSYETA - Psychologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
Blame displacement http://www.psyeta.org/sa/sa7.1/frommer.html Vol. 7 No. 1, 1999
Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine
This article examines how shelter workers and individuals who surrender their companion animals to shelters manage guilt about killing previously valued animals. Researchers used an ethnographic approach that entailed open-ended interviews and direct observations of workers and surrenderers in a major, metropolitan shelter. Both workers and surrenderers used blame displacement as a mechanism for dealing with their guilt over euthanasia or its possibility. Understanding this coping strategy provides insights into how society continues to relinquish animal companions -- despite the animals' chances of death -- as well as how shelter workers cope with killing the animals they aim to protect.
AAS: note that these researchers make the common mistake of calling these facilities "shelters" . The use of the word "shelter" to describe a place that kills anything is a great part of the problem of false public perceptions that hide the true agenda of these facilities. Only when the public perceives the truth about the "sheltering" business will anything change. If they kill, they are not "shelters", they are business facilities where free product is displayed and sold, and if not sold, killed.
Millions of healthy animals are euthanized each year in American shelters. Estimates of yearly euthanasia rates vary from 2.4 million dogs (Patronek & Rowan, 1995) to 11.1 to 18.6 million cats and dogs (Nassar, Talboy, & Moulton, 1992). Even a 5% euthanasia rate, a conservative estimate, shows that an unacceptably large number of animals are being euthanized (Rowan, 1992).
One might suppose that many of the animals turned in to shelters are strays. Alternatively, one might suppose they represent the remnants of puppy and kitten litters, those for whom a home could not be found. But the truth is that many euthanized animals are companion animals surrendered by their caregivers (Patronek & Glickman, 1994).
Research suggests that surrenderers who relinquish companion animals may experience feelings of conflict, doubt, regret, and shame -- key components of guilt (Henry, 1973). DiGiacomo, Arluke, and Patronek (1998) report that the vast majority of surrenderers find relinquishment a difficult and complex decision. McNicholas and Collis (1995) point out that many pet owners have strong feelings of doubt about the necessity or inevitability of euthanasia when discussing its elective possibility for their ill or elderly pets -- even when they are convinced that it's the kindest thing to do.
Arkow and Dow (1984) claim that those who acquire dogs for companionship rather than for utilitarian purposes, such as guarding a home, regret surrendering their pets and acknowledge that they would choose to keep them if the problems leading to relinquishment could be resolved. Dorr Research Corporation (1994) and Patronek (1995) even contend that many pet owners are unwilling to admit to relinquishment, suggesting that they were ashamed of their actions.
Research also shows that surrenderers are not the only ones who experience guilt about euthanizing animals brought to shelters. Euthanasia appears to arouse various emotions among shelter workers that would indicate guilty feelings. A number of studies, for example, have found that euthanizing animals causes stress for many shelter workers (Cochran, 1989; White & Shawhan, 1996) because they feel a conflict between caring for and killing animals (Arluke, 1991; Arluke, 1994). More specifically, this research documents that euthanizing healthy animals violates an ideal conception held by many workers regarding the proper treatment of animals. A nagging inner reproach has led some shelter workers to deny or conceal the practice of euthanasia to outsiders. According to Henry (1973), these feelings are indicators of guilt.
This study began with the finding that the prospect of euthanasia creates guilty feelings for both surrenderers and shelter workers. Rather than further documenting the guilt of these actors, this article focuses on understanding how they cope with it. Strategies used to diffuse this guilt are important in understanding how the relinquishment-euthanasia cycle is perpetuated. Companion animals, given up by people who have a sense of attachment or duty to them, continually arrive at shelters. There, many of the companion animals will be euthanized by people who also care about their welfare. Surrenderers and shelter workers will continue this cycle as long as they can cope with their emotions about the deaths they cause. To the extent that both parties experience guilt in this situation, understanding how they manage this emotion is essential to unpacking the relinquishment-euthanasia cycle and allowing concerned individuals to discuss and debate it.
In order to understand how surrenderers and shelter workers cope with the guilt of euthanasia, an ethnographic study was conducted of a full-service shelter serving a major, northeastern city and its surrounding areas. This shelter received nearly 7,000 animals in 1995, the majority of whom were cats and dogs. Of the animals received,2 195 were adopted, and, following a holding period, 2,422 were euthanized. The rest, if not dead on arrival, were either returned to their owners, sent to the city's animal control facility, or euthanized immediately at an owner’s request. In 1995, the shelter achieved an adoption rate of 52.7% for cats and dogs.
Open-ended interviews were conducted with surrenderers and shelter workers. Informal and semi-structured, the interviews allowed interviewees to direct the conversations and recount stories of their experiences. Interviews varied in length from 5 to 45 minutes, depending on the interviewees' comfort and willingness to talk. All interviews were tape recorded with permission, and conversations were later transcribed verbatim along with detailed observations.
Eight, paid shelter workers were interviewed, including the shelter manager, animal care supervisor, and the animal caregivers. Staff members were overwhelmingly female (one male) and young (average age in the early 20s). All were high school graduates, and half had college degrees.
Volunteers were excluded from this study because they were not directly involved either in selecting animals for euthanasia or for carrying out the euthanasia. Ten surrenderers were also interviewed. Six men and four women, ranging in age from young adulthood to middle age, represented a mix of racial and socioeconomic groups. Half of the interviewees surrendered dogs. The remainder surrendered cats.
In addition to interviews, observations, and informal interactions with shelter staff and surrenderers, shelter staff provided information about the daily operations of the shelter and allowed researchers to access parts of the shelter closed to the general public. During a seven-month period, researchers visited the shelter at least once a week, occasionally alternating the days on which the visits occurred, in order to observe typical busier days. Visits usually lasted three to four hours. All in all, the fieldwork involved more than 70 hours of interviewing, observing, and note taking. Research showed that surrenderers and shelter workers experienced guilt over the euthanasia of surrendered animals3 and managed their guilt by displacing blame. Although both groups relied on the same general coping strategies, some specific techniques for accomplishing displacement were unique to each group.
Sociologists have long documented a variety of techniques such as vocabularies of motive and accounts that people use to protect themselves psychologically when they consider their own acts immoral, strange, or untoward (Mills, 1940; Scott & Lyman, 1968; Sykes & Matza, 1957. To avoid real or anticipated negative attributions of others as well as self recriminations, people seek to present themselves in a favorable light by constructing explanations -- excuses, justifications, apologies, and absolutions (Arluke & Hafferty, 1996; Hewitt & Stokes, 1975; Tavuchis, 1991).
Guilt feelings, in particular, may spur people to construct these accounts as they try to minimize the perceived blame of others and/or self-blame. Forced to manage ensuing guilt, they rely on after-the-fact, damage-control tactics or blame-management strategies. Studies of legislators (McGraw, 1991), suicide survivors (Henslin, 1970), and convicted rapists (Scully & Marolla, 1984) have demonstrated the use of blame management as a way to forestall emotional and social injury. In these studies, however, blame management is usually examined as only one of a variety of accounting techniques people use. Nevertheless, in some situations, blame management may be a master accounting scheme that overshadows or excludes other types of accounts in terms of their complexity or effectiveness.
AAS: the BC SPCA has very knowingly untilized blame displacement and damage control by blaming "irresponsible owners" or "inadequate laws" or "no other solutions" . The SPCA has said repeatedly that it is a terrible job and that it does not like to do it, but it has no other choice. It has gone further and claimed that the employees who have made a career out of killing unwanted animals are somehow more noble, braver, and humane than most people.
Of course there are other choices, many of them. Aggressive free spay/neuter campaigns and limiting surrender are the two most obvious and effective, but they would have the effect of ending the need for so many "shelters" and all the money to be made from full "shelters".
Unfortunately, researchers have not examined guilt-instilling situations, such as the surrender of animals to shelters, where blame-management strategies might be used as a master-accounting scheme. By examining such guilt-instilling situations, a more complete description of the types of blame-management strategies used might come to light. The interaction of those who mutually instill guilt in each other may elicit blame management. Blame-management strategies, then, may be more complex than prior studies suggest.
Like surrenderers, shelter employees displaced blame to lessen or manage the guilt they experienced over killing animals. Surrenderers often blamed others, and shelter employees often blamed the surrenderers. Shelter workers were observed trying to instill guilt into the surrenderers and often took the moral high ground. Yet, like the surrenderers, they too blamed the victim.
Blaming Surrenderers. Most shelter workers' comments about euthanasia were made in the context of their feelings about, and views of, surrenderers. The two were inextricably linked in their minds. Shelter employees considered surrenderers responsible for the deaths of unadopted animals because they were directly responsible for the behavior problems that made the animals inappropriate for adoption or because they had failed to carry out their lifetime responsibility to these animals. As one shelter employee remarked,
If somebody comes in to surrender an animal, I feel like they did something wrong. [This worker feels like saying to surrenderers,] "You failed. You're bringing this thing that you, you know, adopted as a lifelong companion, back to us, and we might have to kill it."
Another worker narrated an example of a typical, aggravating surrender:
I guess the biggest, all-time aggravating situation that I can think of is somebody who comes in with a cat that is declawed -- they just had it declawed, say, a year ago, and now it's peeing all over the carpet. That is one situation, you know, or it's peeing all over the sofa or the furniture or the rugs and it's not using its litter box, or it's getting snitty. It doesn't have the same personality, they say, since before it was declawed. But then, I guess I do get aggravated with those surrenderers because once they realize that now the cat is mutilated and it's behaving badly, probably because it's mutilated, they don't . . . they just give up on the cat and they bring it to a shelter where we inevitably have to kill it, and . . . they're not interested in doing anymore.
In the example above the shelter worker blamed the surrenderers' actions for the behavior of declawed cats. The declawed cats would have to be euthanized because these relinquishers had caused the intolerable behavior, but then had refused to deal with it and keep them. Another shelter worker reiterated this point, noting that somebody had failed these animals at some point in their lives and this was causing their deaths.
Sometimes the shelter workers were very straightforward in placing blame on surrenderers. One shelter employee stated, "Every time I see someone come in, I think, 'God, you know, we might have to put that animal to sleep. You're so irresponsible!'" Another worker said, "I just want them to realize that they were responsible for it." Not only did workers blame the individuals who brought their animals in for having to euthanize them, they also wanted surrenderers to accept the blame. If surrenderers were held responsible for what happened to their animals, shelter workers would not have to feel that the killings were actually their fault.
Another way in which shelter workers blamed the victims was by viewing the global problem of pet overpopulation and recognizing that most animals in shelters are euthanized simply because there are too many of them and not enough good homes. If this were not the case, shelters might be more like adoption agencies than death row and each relinquishment would seem less like a death sentence for the animal. In this scenario, workers blamed not only the abundance of animals but also the general public for creating the surplus pet population that necessitates euthanasia. Comments such as "I'm mad at whoever it is that's created this problem" and "We're never gonna beat this problem until everybody takes a small amount of responsibility" indicate the shelter workers' frustrations with the public's lack of concern over the killings that shelters are forced to do.
AAS comment: It is the BC SPCA itself that is irresponsible. Where the primary sheltering agency does not take the responsibility of having an aggressive sterilization program, the employees who kill the unwanted have to say that someone else is not taking responsibility. The BC SPCA is acting irresponsible when it spends more on stocking shelters with second-hand pets than it does on sterilization.
One worker described a particularly agonizing day when all the dogs in the kennel had to be euthanized because of an outbreak of parvovirus, a preventable illness. Her almost desperate need to blame someone for this widespread, senseless death was evident when she noted, "It's situations like that . . . [it] gets me angry at people, you know what I mean? Who could have done this? Who could have allowed this to happen?"
Instilling Guilt. When surrenderers failed to display the proper guilt or grief over their relinquishments, shelter workers often sought to make them feel guilty. As one shelter worker said, "I try really hard not to let a person walk out the door without knowing that 'Gee, this could have been corrected.'" By reminding surrenderers that relinquishment was only one of several options, workers placed the responsibility, blame, and guilt on surrenderers. One shelter worker commented, "I don't want to make people feel bad," but it was clear that making surrenderers feel guilty was precisely what she was trying to do. She continued,
Sometimes, I feel like it comes across that way. But I'm not trying to make [them] feel guilty. I'm just trying to let [them] know that as a result of [their] actions, this animal may die. Um, generally when someone says to me, "I don't want you to kill my animal," I say, "Then don't sign that piece of paper [and give] it to me, cause there's a big chance that it's gonna happen." And then they look at me and say, "But what am I supposed to do?" "Well, A-B-C-D-E-F-G. I can give you 20 different things that you could do. If you're not willing to do them, then you're gonna have to accept [it], if your choice is to give me the animal, then you're gonna have to accept that this might happen."
This worker came back to this point later, explaining how she would come across to a surrenderer to whom she had given problem-solving options.
Now you make another choice. Are you definitely going to leave this animal with me or are you going to try to work it out? If you're not going to try to work it out -- if you're definitely gonna leave it with me -- understand that this might happen.
Another shelter worker's approach to making surrenderers feel guilty was somewhat more passive because she did not assuage surrenderers’ guilty feelings. As she said, "If they come in and act like this is a bag of trash that they want to hand me . . . I tend to be much shorter with them and, um, much less consoling, you know?" One worker noted that she was not intentionally rough on surrenderers, but recognized that she could come across that way. As she explained, "I don't ever try to be mean but, God, I would walk out of there feeling like, maybe I could have tried something else. Maybe I -- I should have tried something else."
Taking the Moral High Ground. By blaming surrenderers, shelter workers set themselves apart from and above those who surrendered animals to them. In a sense, they took the moral high ground, claiming that they would never make the kinds of mistakes or decisions that people who surrender animals to them make regularly (Weaver, 1986).. By insisting that they would never break their lifelong commitment to their own animals, they separated themselves from the group of people who were actually responsible for the need to kill animals placed in shelters.
In fact, workers were quite aware of using this strategy. One shelter worker admitted that she did this at the beginning of her career but implied that she had softened over time as she encountered more surrenderers.
When I started working here, I think I was pretty much the typical self-righteous, I-know-everything-about-animals [type] and [felt that] none of my animals would ever end up in a shelter, and [that] these people [surrendering animals] must be ignorant and uncaring both at the same time.
Another worker expressed frustrated over a situation that she could not fathom touching her own life:
And, you know what I mean? Moving -- moving as a reason. Well, jeeze, you know what I mean? I've moved three times with two cats and two dogs. How is it that I can manage to find an apartment that allows animals, but [they] can't?
This shelter worker would consider moving to a new home only if she could take her pets. Another shelter employee made the same assessment of her commitment to her pets, swearing,
I would never move anywhere without my animals. I would protect them, you know. I would do anything I could for them. I have five animals at home that I have to take care of on a daily basis and -- and damn it all -- they'll never be in a shelter. I don't care if I'm sleeping in -- in [the street] tomorrow -- my dogs will be sleeping next to me.
Claiming the moral high ground also enabled shelter workers to judge the actions of surrenderers and conclude that they had neither tried hard enough to solve their problems nor properly cared for their animals. One shelter worker spoke for her colleagues when she said, "It aggravates us when we think they haven't put the effort into taking care of their animals to make it work, when it's obvious that they can." Another employee developed an answer:
People have really simple problems or, you know, that are more annoyances than problems, with their animals, and they just don't examine their situation and solve it before they come to us. And then they come to us as if the world has collapsed and they're frustrated beyond belief, when all it is, is [that] they need to come home and walk the dog first before they sit down and watch the news, or so it's having a piddle accident, you know, and it's really basic things that are easily solved and they're not willing to do it.
By viewing the surrenderers problems as minor and solvable and depicting them as stubborn and uncaring, shelter workers emphasized the wrongdoing of surrenderers who relinquished pets. Magnifying this wrongdoing made workers seem all the more kind and helpful, particularly considering the people they helped. This served not only to reverse the workers' guilt but also to commend them for the job.
Blaming the Victim. Shelter workers, like surrenderers, coped with euthanasia by viewing it as necessary for the animals' sakes, a better alternative to a bad quality of life or painful death. Every time I kill an animal,” a worker remarked, “I think to myself, ‘What a shame, what a shame. This is so unfair.’ But, thank God it wasn't getting smushed by a car, or getting shot in the head, or whatever could have happened.” Another worker, almost as graphic in describing the possible horrors an animal could meet outside the shelter. said, "It's better, you know. I have to realize that it's better than what a lot of people would do: leave it or, you know, drown it or something. You know,” she continued, people drown cats. By assuming that the animals would meet a worse fate as a stray or with uncaring people, shelter workers enabled themselves to view euthanasia as merciful. By viewing killing as an act of mercy, shelter workers absolved themselves of their guilt.
A related strategy considered animals' deaths both ongoing and inevitable. Shelter workers resolved their guilt by seeing that the animals were slowly dying in the shelter -- euthanasia served merely as an earlier endpoint to eventual death. One shelter worker accomplished this, even putting a positive spin on her participation, by viewing the deaths of the animals in her shelter as a process that she just helps along.
And I'm not actually killing the animal. I'm just giving it an injection. I'm just helping the process speed up. It -- I really feel that most of these animals are dying as we speak. Um, sitting in those cages, the kennel stress that goes on, the frustration . . . the fear, loneliness, and boredom. I mean, I -- I can't call it living. Um, so by euthanasia, I think that we're only helping the process along. It's already started, long before we decided to.
Discussion
Surrenderers and shelter workers were bound by a common concern for animals taken to shelters. Both groups were very much concerned about the euthanasia of valued animals, experienced guilt over it, and used the same general strategy to mitigate their guilt -- namely; both groups refused to accept blame for euthanasia. That these groups resorted to blame-reducing strategies is not surprising. They appeared to patch together an intricate web of these strategies and made their defences in tandem, each group unaware of the depth or complexity of the other’s perspectives.
Both groups relied on several blame-management strategies. Both surrenderers and shelter workers resorted to blaming the victim (Ryan, 1976) by pointing to problems with animals that justified their euthanasia.
Unlike conventional victim blaming, however, which fault individuals rather than the social systems creating the problems, both surrenderers and shelter workers had a sophisticated view of the problem. In their views, society at large is at fault for the need to euthanize some animals because society created the pet overpopulation problem. Both surrenderers and shelter workers also blamed specific others. Surrenderers would blame the person or persons who made it necessary for them to relinquish their pets, such as their landlord or spouse, while shelter workers blamed individual surrenderers for failing to live up to a lifelong commitment to their companion animals. Finally, shelter workers tried to minimize blame by conveying positive character information about themselves (Weaver, 1986).
Second, previous studies of guilt-mitigating techniques have demonstrated that, in order to reduce responsibility for particular acts, individuals commonly diffuse blame in a guilt hierarchy by attributing the major responsibility of their act to others, yet feeling some degree of blame (Henslin, 1970). In this study, surrenderers and shelter workers appeared to accept no blame and externalized all responsibility for euthanasia. In short, they placed virtually all the blame on others. This reaction was similar to another in which individuals claim absolutely no responsibility for their acts. People who are part of an organizational chain-of-command blame perceived or actual wrongdoing on those having uttermost authority (Vaughan & Sjoberg, 1970). The blame-management process in this study, however, did not rely on an organizational chain of command. Shelter workers did not blame their supervisors, and surrenderers had no organization to blame. Yet, like the organizational dissipation of responsibility by those lower in the hierarchy, both surrenderers and shelter workers placed the full responsibility for euthanasia with other individuals or with society at large.
These findings contribute to our understanding of both sides of the shelter blame-game. By resorting to a host of blame-management strategies, both groups avoided personal responsibility for the problem and failed to construct a common ground for promoting communication between them. Yet it is this very communication that could stop the cycle of surrender and euthanasia. Shelter managers and administrators can use these strategies to improve the effectiveness of staff members' interactions with the public, curbing certain guilt-producing strategies that alienate the public. To make surrenderers feel actively guilty or otherwise offended only serves the workers' short-term purpose of relieving their own guilt and stress. The surrenderers potentially may turn against the humane community, making unlikely any benefit from educational approaches by the shelter or any other humane groups.
To make shelter workers more aware of surrenderers' feelings of guilt may improve the morale of shelter staff, helping them to recognize that many surrenderers are not callous and uncaring toward animals. Also, shelter workers may feel less alone in their concerns for the animals. By being sensitive to surrenderers' guilt and loss, shelter workers may feel more willing to converse with them and provide the supportive, educational experience that could improve the surrenderers' opinion of the humane community and help them to make better decisions regarding future pet ownership.
The humane community, as a whole, may benefit from understanding the guilt that surrenderers experience as they relinquish their companion animals. Such understanding helps those who look for ways to implement both public awareness and educational programs that promote responsible pet ownership. Knowing why people surrender pets may be helpful in determining ways to prevent the problem situations that underlie relinquishment. Understanding how people manage their feelings once they have decided to surrender an animal, however, may be just as important. After all, in many cases, the why can be solved? Pet owners can learn how to train cats not to destroy furniture, individuals can look for apartments that allow pets, and professional dog walkers can take a puppy out during the middle of the day until he or she is housebroken -- simple solutions to common pet problems. Yet these problems are reasons why caregivers surrender companion animals to shelters.
Information about surrenderers' coping strategies can be invaluable in the design of future educational efforts to make pet owners think more seriously before they relinquish their pets. Making the public aware that youth does not guarantee an animal's adoption may result in an owner’s considering the reality of a pet’s future before deciding to surrender that companion animal. It may also inspire people to think more carefully about the long-term commitment needed to care properly for pets. These are important and useful tools in promoting the humane community's ultimate mission of improving companion animal welfare through responsible pet ownership and public awareness.
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Notes
1. Correspondence should be addressed to Stephanie S. Frommer, Center for Animals and Public Policy, Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine, 200 Westboro Road, North Grafton, MA 01536.
2. No differences were found between surrenderers of dogs and cats in terms of guilt experienced or strategies used to manage it. It is possible that these differences were not apparent because only a small number of surrenderers were studied. If larger samples can be obtained, examining differences between surrenderers of different species may be a useful and interesting goal for future research.
3. What is particularly interesting about shelter workers' and surrenders' comments about euthanasia is that the topic arose often in interviews even though respondents were never directly asked about it. Direct questions only focused on their feelings about surrendering.
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