Agenda - 09-19-2006-7b - Laserfiche WebLink

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orange County Animal Services Sheltering Practices and Philosophies 4g Montana, already had a high adoption rate, she says, As the only shelter in town, the humane society had always been open-admission-and Johnson believed it needed to stay that way in order to protect the animals in her community. But she soon realized she couldn't have it both ways. Tremendous pressure to meet the goal of "no euthanasia"-combined with the need to provide refuge for all homeless cats and dogs-resulted in suffering: animals who came in "adoptable" quickly became unadoptable in a crowded environment that wore on their temperaments and made them sick, "We were 'no kill' and 'open-admissions,' and for a while we were able to keep that up," says .Johnson, now the executive director of the Humane Society of Park County in nearby Livingston, "But, as was bound to happen, the flow of incoming animals started exceeding the flaw of outgoing animals. So it became incredibly crowded, And I began to not feel very good about what I was doing, I began to question how humane it was to keep marginally adoptable animals in a not-so-great kennel situation far a long period of time.... And the animals were getting sick because they were crowded, spreading disease like crazy." When Johnson took aver her new position two years ago, she had a difficult time adjusting to euthanasia again, "But I feel that we are doing realistic, positive work here," she says, "I don't have any moral quandaries or ethical quandaries about what I'm doing here, I couldn't say that before," Perhaps ironically, the evolution of the "no kill" movement as a whole mimics, on a grander scale, the very personal revelations every person experiences when she enters the field-often privately, often devastatingly, Mary Metzner, shelter supervisor at the St. Louis County Animal Control Services south shelter in Ladue, Missouri, says what she felt after witnessing euthanasia during her first days in the field has never left her., "I didn't get sick, I didn't get sad. Just kind of an empty feeling, and I still have that feeling," says Metzner, who also serves as the current president of the National Animal Control Association. "It has never changed. It has never gotten easy. I tell people---staff and even the public-if it doesn't bother you, get out of the business," In confronting the euthanasia issue for the first time, the first question people ask themselves and their colleagues is usually, "Haw can this be happening?" And then: "What can I do to change this?" And later: "What can I do to change this while also making all these animals as comfortable and happy as I can in the meantime?" After spending years, sometimes decades, trying to dissuade people from old notions about "pounds" and cajoling them to even care about homeless animals in the first place, some longtime shelter professionals are understandably offended by the implication that the goal to stop euthanizing physically and mentally healthy animals is somehow "new."