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Shelter Dogs



 
 
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Old December 15th 03, 03:13 PM
Julia Altshuler
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Default Shelter Dogs

This whole discussion was starting to sound awfully familiar so I looked
back in my sent mail and found that we'd had the discussion as recently
as October. Back then we were talking about food aggression as it
relates to choosing which shelter dogs to put down (kill). Here's what
I had to say on the subject then:

------------------------------------

For me, the question isn't so much whether the food aggression test is
fair or not-- it obviously isn't-- it is whether the food aggression
test is more fair than some other.

Let's imagine that you have 200 dogs you'd like to find homes for but
money and space for only 100. You also know from past experience that
only 75 good homes looking to adopt a dog are likely to walk in the door
in any given week. The sad truth is that 100 dogs are going to have to
be killed. How do you choose which ones?

You could put numbers in a hat. You could come up with some formula
based on how long the dog has been awaiting adoption. You could look at
the age and health of the dog. You could look at how much time and
training the dog would need to become a good pet. You could choose
based on size or furriness or whether adopters tend to like long ears or
short tails. When you get down to it, pretty much any method you choose
is unfair.

If you had space for 100 dogs, only 50 dogs, and more adopting families
than you could supply with dogs, then you'd want to adopt out every dog
you had. The only dogs that would be killed would be ones that were so
vicious and unable to be rehabilitated that they presented an immediate
danger to people. A minor food aggression problem or an imaginary food
aggression problem wouldn't enter into it.

------------------------------------


I wonder if this is one of those long discussions where we spend a lot
of words coming to the conclusion that we all basically agree. Perhaps
it all comes down to the interpretation of the age old cry of "THAT'S
NOT FAIR!" Some will hear that and immediately think "that's not fair
and therefore steps should immediately be taken to come up with a more
fair system and implement that system." Others will hear "that's not
fair" and sympathetically agree with the crier. They'll both feel
better for yelling and letting off steam but not feel the necessity to
do anything about it.

Perhaps the result of the "that's not fair" in this instance is to work
to make fewer dogs in need of homes (not breeding dogs who don't have
homes all lined up) and to work to make more homes (better training
efforts for people who want dogs).

Let me go off on one of my extended metaphors. My lit class spent a
little time on the Puritan Revolution in England. I've thought about it
a lot because I'd always studied that spot in history from the
perspective of its influence on the U.S., not on England itself. For
the first time I thought about what a paradigm shift that must have been
for a nation of people who were used to thinking in terms of the divine
right of kings to execute their king for treason. Before then, the
mindset was that one could get a bad king and one could complain about a
bad king, but it was like complaining about bad weather. You didn't
really believe anything could or should be done.

That's my analogy for the different ways we look at the cry of "that's
not fair!"

--Lia

 




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