No kill animal shelters are wonderful, but while it's better than being put to sleep, when animals are left up for adoption for years, it is still a big bummer to both the animals and the volunteers. That happened to little Chester. He was at the shelter for five years and volunteers were heartbroken to see the sweet pooch get overlooked time and time again. That's when they decided to post the picture above.
Within a matter of hours, the Facebook image was shared 6,000 times. Someone suggested they make a page just for Chester and the page now has over 6,000 views. While Chester, of course, was adopted almost immediately, the shelter plans to keep Chester's Facebook alive to help promote the adoption of other long-term residents.
Via SoutholdLOCAL
No, they're not. There are a huge number of problems with the concept, up to and including the serious behavioral and health problems that can occur with holding an animal for extended periods of time in a poor environment, not to mention the openly-promoted idea that "kill" shelters are doing it wrong. The gut distaste over killing an animal can, unfortunately, lead to numerous responses that are far more damaging because people think that the 'ultimate' response is to be avoided at all costs.
Five years! In what - kennels, with a fluctuating level of bonding and care? With how much activity? With what kind of food? Is such an animal even going to be able to be housebroken? Take a look at the studies of long-term kenneling on animals and tell me this is a good idea.
Here's the grim reality: there aren't enough homes for them all - even if everyone adopted a dozen animals, over and above what they have right now. This will not change until responsible pet ownership is a hell of a lot more prevalent throughout the population - that means no unwanted litters, that means no breeding programs for designer or fad animals, that means no concept of disposable animals because they didn't work out (or the owner hadn't the faintest idea how to care for them.) That's a big cultural change, and it's not going to happen overnight. And it's not going to happen as long as a large percentage of people can alleviate their guilt and their impatience with an animal by taking it to the "no-kill" shelter and everything's hunky-dory - nothing can possibly go wrong, sunshine and lollipops.
I did a study, about a decade ago, on no-kill shelters. Bottom line: they don't exist - not as any municipality whatsoever that could take in all of the stray and unwanted animals in their jurisdiction. Such so-called shelters can only survive by being very specific about which animals they accept, and a surprising number of them take their sick, problem, and chronically unadoptable animals to the nearest "kill" shelter, making them technically capable of saying, "We didn't do it!" One actually shipped its overflow numbers of animals over three-hundred miles to another shelter on Long Island, to take advantage of the greater population in that area (and the fact that that area also had its share of "kill" shelters.) As I said, this was a decade ago - maybe, some municipality, some county, has made this business plan work in the interim - but I can tell you directly, it's not a viable option for the majority of the country, if not most countries around the world.
[I was also responsible for animal cruelty investigations in this facet of my life, and investigated countless "foster" homes and a couple of hoarding situations, courtesy of "no-kill" thinking that led to animals living in utter filth, rampant disease, and developing irreconcilable behavioral problems because nobody was on their game enough to ensure that any standards were maintained. Was that better, somehow? I'm perfectly willing to tell you it was far worse.]
If you don't like euthanasia, fine, good, you're human - I'm not suggesting you change this. But there's the effort of finding solutions, and then there's the concept of thinking the problem will go away if ignored. Sometimes you have to let the thinking brain override the emotions.