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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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