Shocking How the 'No-Kill' Label Hurts Animals

We’ve learned, haven’t we, when you are
told “You’re a winner!” that there’s some fine print and a catch. The
same is true with the magic words that imply that dogs and cats are winners,
too: “no kill”! Here, too, there is fine print, and it can be much
more damaging than finding that you are being billed for a subscription you
didn’t want. The fact is that many limited-admission shelters, now often given
the great-sounding, dressed-up title “no-kill shelter,” actually hurt animals every single day. Not necessarily the ones they take in,
who may or may not be well cared for, but rather, the ones they don’t. The
animals someone else has to decide what to do with or who just end up abandoned
or worse when the “no-kill” shelter is full, as it inevitably
is. 

These glorious-sounding shelters generally
turn away many more
animals than they accept, picking, choosing, and admitting only the youngest,
healthiest, prettiest, and most adoptable, if any, because on most days, they
will tell all comers, “We’re full.” The rest are sent away to suffer
on the streets or to be left in the hands of people who don’t want them. Some “no-kills” do accept
animals when they shouldn’t, by which I mean when their facilities are already
crammed beyond capacity, subjecting all of the shelter’s tenants to crowded, unsanitary
conditions, illness, and often a painful death from parvovirus or from fighting.
And if the animals they do take in are not adopted, many so-called “no-kill”
shelters warehouse them in cages for years, unwanted and unloved, even after
they are driven “cage crazy” from the stress of confinement. I’ve seen them
sit with their back to visitors, withdrawn into a world of depression and lost
hope.

“No-kill” advocates are quick
to throw stones at open-admission
shelters, which
offer refuge to every animal who comes through their doors and euthanize animals when they are
not adoptable, when they run out of appropriate living space for them,
or when the animals brought in are injured, aggressive or gravely ill. So in
return, PETA is quick to expose the cracks in the rosy picture that “no-kills”
try to paint. Here are just a few of the recent additions to our long, ever-expanding
list of “no-kill”
failures that cause animals to suffer: 

September 13, 2012/Corpus
Christi, Texas: Area animal
shelters report that they are filled to capacity and that homeless, roaming animals in the
area are at “epidemic” levels. The
shelter director at no-kill “Pee Wee’s Pet Adoption World and Sanctuary”
stated, “I get 75 calls a day, and people get angry because I can’t take
75 animals a day .… If you multiply 75 times 365 days a year, I would have to
take in 27,000 plus animals a year.” The Gulf Coast Humane Society
director reports that his shelter “turn[s] people away right and
left.”

July 20,
2012/Northeast Mississippi: Area open-admission animal shelters
are suffering from the effects of some private shelters’ picking and choosing in
order to limit admissions in a ploy to call themselves “no-kill”
for fundraising appeals. A local news outlet reported that, while the [no-kill] policy keeps
current shelter residents alive, it limits the number of pets those facilities
can house and means new arrivals routinely are turned away. Some then are “dumped
alongside roads, abandoned at a neighbor’s house or shot and killed,” according to representatives of no-kill
shelters citing what jilted pet owners have told them. The writer spoke with a woman taking
three unwanted dogs to an open-admission shelter and whose husband had made his
family’s options and intentions clear: “It was either that or shoot them.”

July 17, 2012/Willis,
Texas: “Considered one
of the country’s [premier] sanctuaries for pit bulls,” was the no-kill Spindletop Dog Refuge was raided
by authorities who seized approximately 300 pit bulls found in tiny plastic
carriers with no water and unable to fully stand up. Some dogs were seen
drinking their own urine and a police news report revealed that “[o]ne dog’s
feet were so scalded it was laying on its back in its own urine in feces,
presumably to take the pain off of its feet.”

As long as outspoken “no-kill”
proponents continue to criticize open-admission shelters even
in the face of the animal
homelessness crisis, PETA will continue to save
animals by exposing “no-kills” for what they really are: “slow-kills.”