Animal Welfare Movement

In looking at my last post, no one can accuse me of smooth-talking. So? What do I do with it? Do I throw it out or do I try to sift through it? Let’s try again.

Animal Welfare is looking at each individual animal and attempts to do what is best for it given current resources. Animal Rights is looking at the plight of groups of animals and shifting the mindset of society to raise the animal’s plight to higher importance.

From an Animal Welfare approach you look at the condition of an animal and determine if you can improve the animal’s condition given the resources at hand. It becomes most noticeable when determining whether an organization should treat a medically compromised animal. What factors do you consider? Probably the most important factor is if there is any home where the animal’s owner will show up and assume financial responsibility for the animal. Organizations with limited budgets will be more likely to treat an injured animal if the animal is wearing some form of identification, hinting that an owner might be out looking for their pet. The difficulty is trying to get inside the mind of that owner as to what they would accept as a reasonable amount that they would pay out for their pet.

When treating an injured animal, the organization has to decide if care for the one animal outweighs the care for the other animals in your care. The one notion that people cannot get their heads around is that animal shelters do not have unlimited resources. I have witnessed many incidents in which an animal’s owner would surrender their pet, as a stray, to the animal shelter because they didn’t want to pay the cost for the medical treatment that their pet needed. These folks seem to be the least understanding when the shelter decides that the cost of treatment is beyond them as well. People think that the shelter should throw any amount of funds so that the owner can come return later to adopt back their own pet. So, seeing an ID on the animal is not always an indication that someone is out there in the world to accept financial responsibility of the pet. It does, however, give shelter staff hope and I am more likely to hold the animal longer at the shelter and offer up more money to help the animal with ID.

From an animal rights perspective, the decision to treat the animal is easy. All animals deserve the right to live. The only exception is the animal is demonstrating that it is in such pain and the animal would be better off being put to sleep. Animal rights folks would browbeat anyone standing in the way to prevent treatment. The animal rights folks would just as likely treat a potentially dangerous animal as it would any other.

From an animal welfare perspective, a shelter might hold off on treatment of an animal that doesn’t offer any return on investment. In other words, is the animal adoptable, or after a long stay you are going to have to euthanize the animal anyway? And then you are out the funds that you could have used to save other animals. From an animal rights perspective, you see that one animal representing every other animal and that if you don’t save the one, then that is your attitude towards all the rest. In the case of potentially dangerous animals, the animal rights folks have me pegged. I would rather keep a dangerous dog comfortable during its stray holding period than throw a bunch of money towards it when I have no notion of returning the animal back into the community.

From an outside perspective, one group makes the decision and moves on to help the animals that they are capable of helping. From the other perspective, the groups sees that failure to help that one animal is evidence that other animals won’t be helped either. As such, animal rights groups will attempt to teach you a lesson and go public to try to turn your community against you. The best beating, in their minds, is from the people who fund your organization.

Animal Rights groups cannot wrap their heads around the fact that animal shelters have limited resources. They are not smart enough to understand that communities that fund the animal shelter also have limited resources. Time after time, when I was fighting for funding for my shelter, I heard other voices crying out that funding that was allocated to me would take away from allocations to children in the community. Animal Rights folks can’t understand the competition that animal shelters face for funding.

An Animal Rights group might offer limited funding to push their efforts, but they expect the animal shelter to continue funding the project after it gets off to a good start. The problem is that communities are more sensitive to the economy than are the animal right folks. If the economy is hard now, it is likely to be worse when the pilot program ends. You can’t make a promise to fund a project two or three years down the road when you can’t afford it now.

Notwithstanding the economic climate; the animal rights folks will feel slighted because they feel their cause is higher than any other that communities might face in the future. As such, they will make a public spectacle to bloody the community leaders and the animal shelter staff. I have had to fight this battle many times in my career and for that reason, I don’t think much of animal rights groups. If there is any message to send them; despite what they feel are their priorities, in budget deliberations, children trumps animals every time. Animal Rights folks believe that their cause is the only one that matters; that is their world. Communities have to deal with a much larger world.

A public animal shelter rarely gains financially when they become No-Kill. Animal Rights groups, on the other hand, can access private funding for punishing animal shelters into submission. In the end, public animal shelters have to go through great financial hardship when pushing the No-Kill agenda, but the taskmasters are financially rewarded. There is example after example of governmental organizations spending tons of money to gain and hang on to their No-Kill status. Read about the City of Austin going through it. Just ask Google: Mainly, no-kill created shelter overcrowding, forced shelter staff to reduce the quality of care for their animals, and came at a great expense. Was it worth it? Depends on who you ask. It mostly depends on the amount of available cash that a city has to spend on such efforts. Most cities could not have pulled off what Austin did… none that I ever worked in. That doesn’t mean that we didn’t have our own success stories. I found that the most successful programs that we pulled off were ones in which we made it financially feasible for animal rescue groups to join our cause.

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Why do I bother with this now? As a governmental employee, I had to wear a muzzle throughout my career. When I retired, I was able to throw off my muzzle and speak my truth, even if it first appeared as gibberish on paper. At least, it is unfiltered gibberish. And, I hate bullies. When I see bullies, in any form, I’ll lash out. Animal Rights groups are eager to bully an animal shelter into compliance. Sometimes it is justified but usually, it isn’t