Who Should Kill?

As long as society permits the overproduction of pet animals, society must dispose of the unwanted. Who should kill them?

The killers should not be any agency which calls itself a humane society or an animal welfare society, or an animal protection society, or an animal shelter.

It has long been recognized that enabling behaviour encourages that behaviour. Real animal welfarists have pointed out for decades that any agency that takes every animal brought to it, and then kills some of them on the grounds that they do not have enough space or resources, is not practicing animal welfare, it is practicing animal control and disposal. It is very likely being paid with tax dollars by some level of government, usually municipal governments which contract out animal control/disposal.

Enabling can be very profitable. Contracts can be worth many millions of dollars a year if there are enough of them.

Agencies that practice unlimited surrender logically must kill many animals because of the fact that there are more animals than homes for them. Real shelters take only as many animals as they have space and resources for, refusing the immorality of killing some animals to make room for more.

Setting the example of easy pet-dumping by taking every animal inevitably led to an entrenched public attitude that it was okay to dump your unwanted pet at the nearest "shelter". Essentially, all these animals were free product.

Who should kill?

Unwanted pets and dangerous animals are a fact of life in our society thanks in some part to animal-welfare agencies not addressing root causes of animal over-production, and by selling sexually intact animals, and by actually breeding and selling animals themselves. As we've explained, it is not any agency with a stated animal-welfare/animal-protection mandate that should be killing excess or dangerous or pest-pet public nuisance animals such as feral cats and rabbits.

When real shelters are full (and won't kill to make room for more) and when all the alternative animal-rescue/animal-welfare societies cannot take on more animals, or when a dog is clearly a public danger then the animals' owners must be made to take responsibility for their actions. Animal-welfare societies should not do their killing for them.

Who should kill unwanted or dangerous or pest animals? Society allows this, so society's taxes should pay for it. Only municipal pounds should kill society's unwanted or dangerous or pest animals, so that it is absolutely clear that there is a problem that is costing taxpayers money and that needs to be fixed.

Only tax-payer funded municipal pounds should kill excess, or dangerous, or nuisance animals.

Read more >>

[ back to top ]