Domestic Animal Welfare Network

PROBLEM #1 - Anybody Can Be A Breeder !
There is no legal restriction on the breeding of animals. Anyone who want to possess one or more unsterilized dogs or cats and permit them to breed has the right to do so. There is little incentive not to. The owner of a breeding dog has to pay a slightly higher license fee, if they even bother to license the animal.

Laws and ordinances clearly indicate that it is unlawful to allow domestic animals to run unsupervised, and that it is unlawful to abandon an animal. Yet every year, Animal Control Officers capture thousands of "strays" that are obviously of domestic origin. It is very easy to distinguish between a feral animal and one that has been domesticated. There is a significant feral population of cats, and occasionally of wild dogs, but the majority of Animal Control captures continues to be of domestic origin.

In fact, shelters nationwide report the same statistic: roughly 25-40% of "stray" dogs are purebred. They most assuredly originated with breeders, whether professional or amateur.

PROBLEM #2 - Where Are All These Animals ?
While laws and ordinances call for census-taking of dogs, this is a difficult, expensive and intrusive process which has been only partly successful. Nobody really knows what the domestic animal population actually is, nor where they all are.

Periodic finds of large numbers of animals in distressing situations remind us of the truth of this. As I write this, in the coldest part of winter, some of my friends who do animal rescue are dealing an with an abandoned group of 4 dogs which were permanently chained outdoors and roughly 2 dozen cats which roamed indoors and out. None of the animals were sterilized. The owners were evicted and have departed. There is a good chance that every animal will live and
will wind up as part of a loving family. Apparently nobody in the Animal Control or Animal Welfare organizations knew that these animals existed until a concerned neighbor called the rescue group.

PROBLEM #3 - "We've Always Done It This Way"
"Catch and kill" has been nearly the only Animal Control strategy in the State of Michigan. The State early on decided that it was a local problem, and local authorities in most counties and major cities have spent decades and millions of dollars trying to resolve the problem by capturing as many "strays" as possible, trying to get some adopted, and killing the rest. Despite all the effort and expense, the number of "strays" continues unabated. "Catch and kill" has been shown to be ineffective by 90 years of unsuccessful experience.

PROBLEM #4 - "Losing The Focus On Public Safety"
Animal Control began as a means to (1) deal with the "protection of live stock and poultry from damage by dogs" and the "determination and payment of damages done by dogs to live stock and poultry." Then (2) it became a means for controlling the spread of the dread disease Rabies from dogs to humans and livestock. Also, (3) it became a means for dealing with "vicious" and "dangerous" dogs that attacked or bit people. Animal Control in its initial incarnation was based on a clearly-focused vision of Public Safety.

Over time, a second vision worked its way into Animal Control, the concept that any stray or homeless animal posed some remote potential threat or at least some sort of undefined unpleasantness known as "Public Nuisance". This is when Animal Control grew far busier, far more expensive, and far less concerned with the lives of homeless creatures.

Back in the days when Public Safety was the focus, a dog was unlikely to be destroyed unless it was caught in the act of harassing or killing livestock, or unless it attacked a person. Now in the reign of "Public Nuisance", dogs and cats who have done no harm nor even threatened harm are legally killed by the tens of thousands because citizens and lawmakers have not displayed the insight and imagination to develop a system of laws that would prevent this from happening.

- What is needed is a strategy for dealing with abused, endangered and homeless animals which involves truly rescuing them. To seize an abused, endangered or homeless animal, "humanely" KILL that animal, and then claim that a rescue has been performed is a tragic sham. It is a fiction that stretches our communities' claims to morality and humanity paper thin, and violates the principles of compassion and stewardship innate in every mainstream religious faith.

Quite honestly, we don't have a quick-and-slick solution to this problem. It's a money problem, and the State of Michigan treasury has been emptied by more than a decade of drastic underfunding, complicated by a manufactured national depression. If the State can bring domestic animal overbreeding to an end, then homeless animals will essentially disappear and one of our dreams may be realized. We want to live in a State of Michigan where no domestic animal is euthanized except by a veterinarian who declares that the animal has inevitably fatal illness or injury, or is suffering from a non-fatal condition causing inhumane long-term distress, or is behaviorally impaired to the extent of presenting a risk to public safety.

PROBLEM #5 - "It's A Professional Problem"
Animal impoundment facilities, Pounds, now delicately called "Shelters", have usually been run as animal jails and in a great many cases are operated by a Sheriff's Department or Police Department division. Like human jails, visiting is carefully controlled and strict policy of privacy usually prevails at "The Pound". Only recently have outside volunteers been allowed into many of the facilities, with some interesting and positive results. Adoptions have gone up, euthanizations have gone down. Everywhere. No exceptions.

PROBLEM #6- "It's A Local Problem"
There is at this time no effective statewide strategy to deal with the proliferation of Homeless Domestic Animals. Some reasons for this are:

... First, back in the early 20th century when the State initially passed the "Dog Law", it was to protect livestock from dogs. The State set up a local system since it really was a local problem; so that instead of shooting your neighbor's dog, you could call a local law officer to deal with the situation and know that you would be compensated for the damage inflicted.

... Second, when it became obvious that there was a growing population of "stray" dogs and cats that needed to be dealt with, the State again chose to deal with it as a local problem by authorizing and encouraging counties to develop local programs with Animal Control Officers guided by local ordinances.

...Third, when it became obvious that decades of county Animal Control programs were ineffective at dealing with the proliferation of "strays", nobody at the State level has been willing to take on the challenge of developing an effective statewide alternative to "the way we've always done it."

There are some nasty political pitfalls to be dodged. For example, there are an awful lot of people who would rather keep governance local rather than statewide, even though the local strategy isn't working. Another bitter pill is that if the State develops a statewide effective strategy, the cost of it might have to come out the State budget rather than a county or local budget, at a time when the State is effectively broke. It's going to take some serious political courage to overcome the "we've always done it this way" mentality and the "local is better" mindset, at a time when the State treasury has been depleted by more than a decade of underfunding and a national economic depression.

PROBLEM #7- "It's An Animal Problem"
Not really. It's a people problem. There are a group of people who are overbreeding unsterilized domestic animals. Then the animals escape or, more commonly, get abandoned and they wind up being next year's crop of "strays" that will be rounded up and impounded and killed. We need to be sure that we are aiming at the right targets !!!