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So You’re Thinking About Giving Up Your Pet? You Might Want to Reconsider

Spread the word about the REALITY and then DO SOMETHING to change it! The animals desperately need our help!
You can’t keep your pet? Really?

Our society needs a huge “Wake-up” call. As a shelter manager, I am going to share a little insight with you all…a “view from the inside” – if you will.

First off, any of you whom have surrendered a pet to a shelter or humane society should be made to work in the “back” of an animal shelter – for just ONE DAY.

Maybe if you saw the life drain from those sad, lost, confused eyes, you’d stop flagging the ads on here and help these animals find homes. That puppy you just dropped off will most-likely end up in my shelter when it’s no longer a cute little puppy anymore. Just so you know, there’s a 90% chance that your dog will never walk out back out, once entered in to the shelter system…Purebred or not! About 25% of all of the dogs that are “owner surrenders” or “strays” that come into a shelter are purebred dogs.

The most common excuses: “We’re moving and can’t take our dog (or cat).” Really? Where are you moving to that doesn’t allow pets?
Or they say “The dog got bigger than we thought it would”. How big did you think a German Shepherd would get?

“We don’t have time for her”. Really? I work a 10-12 hour day and still have time for my 6 dogs!

“She’s tearing up our yard”. How about making her a part of your family?

“We just don’t want to have to stress about finding a place for her & we know she’ll get adopted, she’s a good dog”. Odds are, your pet won’t get adopted & how stressful do you think it is for your pet?

Did you know…

Your pet has 72 hours to find a new family from the moment you drop it off? Sometimes a little longer if the shelter isn’t full
and your dog/cat manages to stay completely healthy.
If it sniffles, it is euthanized.
Your pet will be confined to a small run/kennel in a room
with other barking & crying animals.
It will have to relieve itself where it eats and sleeps.
It will be depressed and will cry constantly for you.
If your pet is lucky, there will be enough volunteers in that day
to take him/her for a walk.
If not, your pet won’t get any attention besides having a bowl of food slid under the kennel door and the waste sprayed out of it’s pen with a high-powered hose.
If your dog is big, black or any of the “Bully” breeds (pit bull, rottie, mastiff, etc) it was pretty much dead when you walked it through the front door.
If your cat is scared and doesn’t act friendly enough, or if it catches a cold (which most of them ‘do’), it will be put to sleep.

Those dogs & cats just don’t get adopted. In most cases, it doesn’t matter how ‘sweet’ or ‘well behaved’ they are. If your pet doesn’t get adopted within it’s 72 hours and the shelter is full, it will be destroyed. If the shelter isn’t full and your pet is good enough,
and of a desirable enough breed it may get a stay of execution,
but not for long.

Most dogs get very kennel protective after about a week and are
destroyed for showing aggression. Even the sweetest dogs will turn in this environment.

If your pet makes it over all of those hurdles chances are it will get kennel cough or an upper respiratory infection and will be destroyed because the shelter gets paid a fee to euthanize each animal and making money is better than spending money to take this animal to the vet.

Here’s a little euthanasia 101 for those of you that have never witnessed a perfectly healthy, scared animal being “put-down”.

First, your pet will be taken from its kennel on a leash. They always look like they think they are going for a walk…happy, wagging their tails…until they get to “The Room”, every one of them freaks out and puts on the brakes when they get to the door.
It must smell like death or they can feel the sad souls that are left in there. It’s strange, but it happens with every one of them.

Your dog or cat will be restrained, held down by 1 or 2 shelter workers, depending on the size and how freaked out they are.
Then a shelter worker who we call a “euthanasia tech (not a vet)”
finds a vein in the front leg and injects a lethal dose of the “pink stuff”.

Hopefully your pet doesn’t panic from being restrained and jerks.
I’ve seen the needles tear out of a leg and been covered with the resulting blood…the yelps and screams are deafening.

They all don’t just “go to sleep”, sometimes they spasm for a while,
gasp for air and defecate on themselves.

You see, shelters are trying to make money to pay employee pay checks and then, there’s the board of directors…who need to be paid too!

Consequently, corners are cut, & we don’t spend our funds to
tranquilize the animal before injecting them with the lethal drug,
we just put the burning lethal drug in their vein and let them suffer until dead.

If it were not a business for profit, we’d do it humanely and hire a
licensed vet do this procedure. That way, the animal would be sedated or tranquilized and THEN euthanized.

But to do this procedure correctly would only cost more money…
so we don’t necessarily do what is right for the animal, we do what’s expedient so we can continue to make a buck!

Shelters do not have to have a vet perform their euthanasia procedures. Oftentimes, they are untrained personnel administering lethal injections. So… that employee may take 50 pokes with a needle and 3 hours to get inside the vein.

In the end, your pet’s corpse will be stacked like firewood in a large freezer, usually in the back of the building with all of the other animals that were killed. There they will sit until being picked up like garbage.

What happens next? Cremated? Taken to the dump? Rendered into pet food? Or used for schools to dissect and experiment on?

You’ll never know and it probably won’t even cross your mind. After all, it was just an animal and you can always buy another one, right?!

I hope that those of you who still have a beating heart and have read this are bawling your eyes out and can’t get the pictures out of your head. I deal with this everyday. I hate my job, I hate that it exists & I hate that it will always be there unless you people make changes and start educating yourselves, your children, the public.
Do the research, do your homework, and know exactly what you are getting into before getting a pet. These shelters and humane societies exist because people just do not care about animals anymore. And PLEASE stop breeding!

Animals were not intended to be disposable but somehow that is what they’ve become.

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Comment by Lupe Gore on January 21, 2012 at 5:01pm: Paula, what you have posted is absolute horrendous and sickening. Yes it is quite true about the "72 hours". One of the cats living in our home now was taken to the SPCA in late Sept. 2010 at age 14 by friends of the lady who owned her. The owner had to leave her apartment and cat and go to a skilled nursing facility. Upon finding out that this elderly cat had been taken to the SPCA, a mad rush was made to contact them, find out if the cat was still there, and thankfully she was rescued by us. We were told on the phone that she wouldn't have been adoptable, and also thankfully, since "Babita" had been taken there on a Sunday afternoon and this was now a Wednesday morning, she was still alive. At the time we brought her home, there were already eight indoor cats, and two outside. Right now, she is upstairs in the master bedroom, which she has adopted as "her place". After bringing Babita home, three more have been added indoors. There is always room when it comes to saving a life.

Comment by Debbie Smith on January 19, 2012 at 3:24pm: Reading this article has made me feel sick to my stomach and extremely sad. Those beautiful creature, it makes me question who is really the animal. People need educating about the responsibility of pet ownership, it is a lifetime commitment and they give us something that humans do not that is unconditional love, they can make your heart sing. I am writing this with tears rolling down my face. I found the article deeply disturbing.

Comment by Ann Millikan on January 19, 2012 at 10:42am: Paula: YOU are a hero and YOU told it like it is. I have prevented my kitties from going to any shelter for behaviors everyone else has said "get rid of her and put her to sleep". NEVER, we kept a kitty for a behavior nobody would endure for 20 years and loved her and she taught us Buddhist values and she is precious to us to this day. People only think of themselves and their own cosmetic beauty or whatever it is, but not the love, true love for the kitty. Our kitty in now Cat Heaven is the most prized and wonderful Teacher of our lives, so what if she ruined four couches, two chairs, two comforters, and our floors due to territorial reasons when she came home to a dominant Madeline who was possessive of me and Fuchsia peed. We adored her and tolerated her and could not change her and she had the outdoors and indoors and she was a good cat inspite of all her given freedom (Madeline stayed indoors because my kitties are indoors for safety) Fuchsia still peed but stayed close to home outdoors, and we loved her and she taught us that we could always get another couch, but not another Fuchsia. All my cats are teachers, and Fuchsia was beautiful, found in a lumber pile nursing four kittens alone. No, nobody understood. We LOVED our peeing cat. Now people need to get on board and stop being so self-centered and self-loving, and expand their love to their pets and STOP putting them OUTSIDE, NEGLECTING them or putting them in MAILBOXES OR LEFT IN HOUSES WHEN THEY MOVE? WHO ARE THE INNOCENT ONES---certainly not those humans!

Comment by Sandra on January 19, 2012 at 12:37am: I know... it just makes me heartsick reading your blogs about kitties scheduled to die. And I do agree about people giving up their cats (or any pet for that matter) to kill shelters without much thought. It tears me up to see the pictures of cats scheduled to die... honestly, I can't look at them very much because it's such a huge problem with so few solutions... wouldn't it be nice if we could just take them all? I can't dwell on it too much - it makes me sooooo depressed because I can't take even one of the kitties when I'd really like to save them all.

Comment by Paula Hunsaker on January 16, 2012 at 12:53am: Sandra, I totally agree with you about the non-kill shelters. But in reading that article. It really was true to life. In what I have seen at the Lancaster Animal shelter. We would sit and wait until our number was called to be waited on. We watch so many people surrender their animals. I know two of the kittens I got were going to be surrender and I asked the person if I could get them from him before he surrender them. He gave the two kittens to me at that time. We named them Lanie and Cassie after Lancaster their are two girls and both have already been fixed by my vet. But in knowing what we knew about the shelter they would of been killed. In talking to many that were surrendering animals in listen to their conversations many never even tried to find homes for them. Much easier to surrender them. Then to listen to the reason's were so sad like the article talked about. I know one of the cats I got from the shelter was surrender because they didn't like her any more. Her time was up and she would of been killed I took her and she is so sweet. I really think that people that surrender to shelters and human don't have any clue to how a shelter works. Or understand the difference between them and a non-kill. I know one lady on Facebook took me off her friend list over non-kill shelters because she said they all kill. We had a real heated conversation over that. she was telling me that a non-kill is worse them a shelter. I know Lancaster gets $40 animal that has been killed. From the render person. I really think this person was trying to make people see what it is really like behind the scene's at a shelter. In the past month I have seen so many horrible things behind he scene at the Lancaster Shelter. It just makes me so sick.