Some animal control employees keep killing animals week after week, year after year. Some relish the powerful feeling this gives them. And some are so intellectually and ethically bereft that they actually believe the company P.R. line that says that they are heroically doing a noble and compassionate job that few have the courage to do.

No one has to take a paycheque to kill excess animals. Aside from killing dangerous dogs and animals so injured that they can't be saved, all killing of pets that this industry calls "unadoptable" is really only killing the ones that haven't been sold yet or may not be sold for a long time without some money being spent on vets or on rehabilitation. The slow-sellers are not "unadoptable" - not if they are treated as having an intrinsic value instead of only having a financial value. Calling an animal that has not sold "unadoptable" is blaming it for you killing it -- the ultimate indignity in a long line of indignities and betrayals.

The alternative rescue network, that is growing by leaps and bounds because of extreme dissatisfaction with conventional agencies, proves daily that no animal is "unadoptable". If the bills mount up, it is the individuals or the little societies who do without ... not the animals in their care.

Anyone who truly does not want to kill excess animals does not take that paycheque for long -- they quit. Anyone who has had that job for long and still hasn't figured out why what they are doing is immoral, is in the wrong job....that is, if the job description is animal welfare. If the job description is animal control then this is the right person for the job.

There are alternatives to killing the unsold or the hard-to-sell and thousands of little animal-welfarists all over BC find those alternatives every day.

Q: What did PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk do about the root causes for all the killing she did daily at her pound job?

A: She founded her own facility and kept on killing, even when she didn't have to anymore.