No Kill: The Mythology

All shelters will euthanize at one point or another.

If you’re involved in rescue, you will inevitably get animals that are terminally injured or ill, or dangerously unstable, and should not be warehoused in a kennel just for the sake of keeping them alive. Refusing to euthanize at any cost, including illness or injury, amounts to hoarding. The very definition of a “No Kill Shelter” includes the guidelines that unadoptable animals are euthanized. That leaves a lot of room for subjectivity. A shelter that doesn’t invest in any medical or behavioral rehabilitation can still be “no kill” since all of the sick and poorly behaved animals could just be labeled unadoptable. There’s also the opportunity for temperament test standards to fluctuate with cage space, animals becoming more or less adoptable depending on whether there’s a place to put them.

I know it’s not the intention of “no kill” to have a flexible definition of adoptability. But with support built upon the impossible notion that every animal survives, so much focus is on what’s being killed instead of what’s being kept alive. There’s a lot of room for cutting corners in order to maintain that utopian vision.

When I was working in a “kill” shelter, we’d often release animals to our “no kill” counterparts and to rescue groups. Now that I work in rescue, I’ve been on both sides of the fence, and I can tell you that the sense of being overwhelmed with calls as an independent rescuer is nothing like the stress of worrying every single day how many animals, that legally cannot be turned away, will come through the shelter door. So many “no kill” folks cherry-pick the most adoptable dogs and cats from a shelter (which is fine since anything that frees up cages for other animals is a good thing), and then leave, walking away from the big picture. At their facilities, they boast about low euthanasia rates, but never mention what happened to all the other animals, the ones they didn’t take.

It’s not a solution if you ignore half the problem. I don’t want to hear about shelters that achieved “no kill”; I want to hear about communities that got there. They do exist, and those should be our models for the movement. The focus should be on what needs to happen to improve animal care and adoption rates in our society, not just in certain pockets. We need to get rid of misleading semantics and theories built on a misconception of what it takes to shelter an entire community’s animals. Let’s stop reframing the diagnosis and get on with the cure.

Photo credit: sneakerdog