There is a Family Pet Killathone in Virginia this week, bring the family come join in.

www.nathanwinograd.com/?p=4091

Ingrid Newkirk is the Butcher of Norfolk. The whereabouts of this little dog are unknown. If his fate is anything like 97% of the animals PETA seeks out every year, his lifeless body is in PETA’s freezer.

Attention: Dog and cat killers. Ingrid Newkirk of PETA would like to protect you, shield you, promote you, and defend you. There is only one criterion: call yourself an animal shelter. It doesn’t matter if you kill in the face of readily available lifesaving alternatives. Why should it? They do the same, every single day.

It doesn’t matter if you neglect and abuse them before you kill them. It doesn’t matter if you don’t feed them, it doesn’t matter if you allow puppies to drown in drains, and it doesn’t even matter if you beat them to death. PETA will champion your cause.

They will write letters to the editor for you. They will write Op Ed pieces for you. They will attack anyone who criticizes you. They will threaten lawsuits. Whatever it takes. Because as long as you are needlessly killing animals and as long as you are claiming you have no choice but to do so because of “pet overpopulation,” you are providing Newkirk a valuable service. You are giving her political cover for her own dark impulses, which results in PETA seeking out and killing thousands of defenseless animals every year.

The latest salvo from the Butcher of Norfolk is an Op Ed piece in The Jersey Journal, in response to protests by animal lovers in that community, where she comes to the defense of the Liberty Humane Society’s (LHS) recent killing of animals. The Butcher cites Niki Dawson, the interim director at LHS, who stated that she arrived to find the shelter “abysmal, horrendous, shocking, horrifying… It’s difficult to put into words what it’s like to see 99 dogs crammed into a facility built to comfortably house only 50. What it’s like to witness 274 cats in a building meant for only 80. Perhaps the best description is a word we in this field know only so well: HOARDER.”

Dawson should know; she was accused of the same thing when she was forced out of Camden County’s shelter as the director. In fact, her successors used the same tactic in order to justify the killing of hundreds of animals there after she left. Dawson had more than the claimed capacity at Camden County, and the “excess” were simply executed. But the Dawson who was trying to save animals in Camden knew something that the one who was hired to kill them in Jersey City appears to have conveniently forgotten: it is not the number of animals in the facility per se, but the quality of their care.

The fact that a shelter was built for 50 dogs but has 99 means little if the dogs are kept clean, well-cared for, and socialized. And even if you were to accept her statement at face value, even if it was all true, LHS did not have to resort to the extreme, unethical, and cruel option of killing that the Butcher implies is the only logical recourse. They could have cleaned the cages they claimed were filthy. They could have socialized and fostered the animals they claimed were going crazy. They could have adopted out the ones they claimed were being warehoused. Dawson and I had an e-mail exchange over the numbers of animals at LHS