Sick and animals are not expendable "product" to real animal welfarists. Behaviour tests used to justify killing dogs that have been abused into bad behaviour are not acceptable to real animal welfarists.

Treatment and behaviour modification is expensive, but active compassion has always been expensive. Killing is cheap. If an agency is intaking, sorting, selling, and killing the unsellable, it is running a business, not an animal welfare agency.

Ten years ago AAS said if we ran a shelter our motto would be "Killing is not an option - so we must find alternatives while working at root causes."

We also said that knowingly intaking more animals than there are homes for and killing the unsellable, was not ever animal welfare, it is simply the way the pet disposal business is run all over North America.

This callous disposal example, combined with not spending money on root causes, sends the message to the public that pet purchase and disposal is acceptable. Cheap disposal is vitally necessary to a mass-marketing business. The easier it is to dispose of a product, the more of that product that will be produced and sold. Cheap and easy disposal is one of the reasons so many pets are produced and sold to the wrong people.