HomeMy WebLinkAboutPaula Sardinas 12.15.21A Attachment 4
DISMANTING RACISM IN THE
PET RESCUE INDUSTRY
FMS Global Strategies, LLC
OCTOBER 29, 2020
Recognizing and dismantling racism in
animal rescue
Black Lives Matter.
I’m proud to see how many fellow animal rescuers and advocates have shared these words
over the past week. But I also find myself pausing and reflecting on how much racism is at
play in the dog and cat rescue world. For years I’ve said I would write a blog about this. I’ve
never built up the courage. I’ve convinced myself I’m not the right person to hold the
microphone. But I’ve kept a list of ways that rescuers and organizations reinforce structural
racism within our movement, and I’ve thought a lot about how we can do better. And I want
to share it with you.
These are things I have seen over the years. Some of them are things I have done. And the
ideas for changes are just that–my ideas. They are not perfect. I haven’t tried them all. But I
can’t stay silent. (This was first shared as an instagram story series over on @ourpitstop,
where it can still be viewed.)
Adoption requirements that are a coded way to “weed out”
adopters from marginalized groups.
Refusing to consider people who don’t own their own home.
Refusing to consider people who don’t have yards, or fenced in yards.
Refusing to consider people who live a certain number of miles from your community.
Refusing to consider people who don’t feed the high quality food you feed.
Refusing to consider people who don’t have a relationship established with a vet.
Instead: consider any home where the pet’s needs will be met and they will be loved. Make
a conscious effort to recognize when you are biased toward adopters who look like you, or
whose homes are similar to yours, or you share a lot in common.
Negative comments about a municipal or city animal shelter’s
location
“I don’t feel safe being there after dark.”
“Be careful – this is a bad neighborhood.”
“It’s in the ‘hood.’”
“It’s ghetto.”
Instead: Share the shelter’s address. If people make negative comments about a
community, practice anti-racism by calling them out on it or sharing your own positive
experiences with that institution/location. Simply asking “what do you mean by that
comment?” can go a long way.
Assuming that you will be able to offer a better home to a pet
than a family of color by immediately trying to convince that
family to surrender their dog or cat to you, rather than
speaking with them about what resources they need to keep
their pet, and how you can help them.
Instead: begin every conversation with “what would you need to be able to keep your
pet?” Commit to viewing surrender as the last option.
Rejecting prospective adopters who are not native English
speakers, claiming they’re “too difficult to speak to” or “they
don’t understand.”
Instead: find an interpreter in the adopter’s native language or use apps like google
translate. Communicate through them. Do more listening than talking and make a
conscious effort to recognize your implicit biases.
Racism, disrespect or criticism toward shelter employees –
especially kennel cleaners or any other staff person whose job
is physical and/or underpaid.
“Does he even know how to walk a dog?”
“He should get a job at McDonald’s down the street.”
“I can’t even understand the way she talks.”
Explicit racial slurs or microaggressions.
Instead: treat shelter employees with the respect, dignity, and gratitude they deserve. Ask
them questions. Listen to them. Appreciate them. Often these are the workers who care
more for and know more about the shelter pets than anyone else. Think that they lack
skills? Research continuing professional development opportunities and fundraise to make
those opportunities available to them. Do this without seeking praise or fanfare.
Referring to where a dog or cat came from in terms like “the
dangerous inner city,” “a bad neighborhood,” “ghetto,” “the
hood.” These are often coded racist language.
Instead: don’t share where a dog or cat was rescued from (in generic or specific terms)
unless there’s an incredibly compelling reason to do so. Don’t use underserved
communities as a way to fundraise for your organizations or build up your savior complex.
Lack of representation, diversity and inclusion on rescue
organizations’ Board of Directors.
Instead: work to recruit and include people of color and marginalized people. Recognize
that including those people is only the first step. Work to empower diverse voices, opinions
and perspectives. Participate in diversity, equity and inclusion training.
Judging and bashing any owner who surrenders his or her pet
to the shelter, regardless of how well‐cared for the pet seems to
have been or how agonizing the decision is for the owner.
“I would never give up my dog/cat. They’re my babies. What is wrong with people?”
“Some people don’t deserve animals.”
“A pet is a lifelong commitment. I hope this person never has a pet again.”
Instead: check your privilege and assume the best of all pet owners. Recognize that you
have never experienced a life-altering situation that forced you to choose between keeping
your dog or cat and a roof over your head, or food on your table. Approach the situation
with awareness and kindness.
Seeing a video of a white woman mishandling her dog while
threatening a black man’s life, and only focusing on the
treatment of the dog.
Instead: recognize and work to reduce your implicit bias. Take the Harvard Implicit
Association Test, build relationships across lines of difference, and make efforts to expose
yourself to counter stereotypical representations. Commit to searching for
intersectionality with your animal advocacy/rescue work and other social justice
movements.
Choosing not to engage (or responding unkindly) to a potential
adopter who asks how much the adoption fee is.
Instead: respond to the question with honesty and respect. Consider that assuming that
someone can’t afford an adoption fee simply because they are asking about it is an implicit
bias that you should work to dismantle.
Asking people to disclose their income on adoption or foster
applications.
Instead: remove this question from your applications. Challenge yourself to consider the
idea that by asking it you are trying to only adopt to a certain demographic.
Celebrating law enforcement on your organization’s social
media pages.
Instead: Recognize that while police may make you feel safe or that you yourself might be
a police officer or have family members who are, that this is not the experience for many
people of color, who are disproportionately impacted by police brutality. As a first step,
remove posts like these that are likely to alienate people of color. Then, work towards
building solidarity with racial justice initiatives and reducing interpersonal racism and
bias. Many police officers have participated in peaceful protests this week–join them!
Only hosting events in white, wealthy communities.
Instead: host events in historically black communities. Meet new people. Welcome them.
Treating pet ownership as a privilege that does not belong to
non‐white people.
Instead: recognize that we will never get pets out of animal shelters and into homes unless
we work to include diverse and marginalized populations. Our movement requires
inclusivity. We must work to be anti-racist allies.
Best Friends Staff Open Up about
Their Experiences with Racism in
Animal Welfare
Last week, Best Friends’ CEO Julie Castle devoted her blog to the topic of systemic racism that
exists within animal welfare. Looking around at those we work with every day, it is sobering to
confirm that “the voices at our table are not the voices of all of America.”
The staff at Best Friends is ready for that to change. We understand that we must engage in the
long overdue, difficult work of honest self-reflection and personal accountability.
Looking inward is only one piece. We also need to listen to the voices of colleagues who bring
other perspectives to the table. This week, we are featuring the voices of eight African
American, Hispanic, Native American and mixed-race Best Friends staff members.
Today’s editorial will focus on their individual experiences with racism and discrimination within
animal welfare, and we’ll finish up on Friday by finding out what steps they feel we should be
taking to change the face of our organization and animal welfare as a whole.
We want to thank them for being brave and candid in discussing this charged and intensely
personal issue. We want them to know we are listening.
First days in animal welfare
As someone who is half Native American, senior director of national mission advancement Marc
Peralta has always been most comfortable with other people of color. When he started his
career in sheltering, however, he found that his was the only brown face in a sea of white.
“I was back to a place where I was the minority, and where the overall belief system was
alarming to me,” he says. “I noticed that the staff actually changed the way they spoke around
people of color.”
He also found himself being questioned about the theft of drugs from the shelter.
“Two staff members were stealing and selling Ketamine, and the only other person they
questioned was me,” he recalls. “It didn’t make sense because I wasn’t even friends with them.
It ended well in that I was promoted into the management role after they were fired. I like to
think that was because it was the first time the director of operations really talked to me, but it
may have been guilt. I don’t really know.”
Extension of bias to volunteers
Best Friends legislative attorney Akisha Townsend-Eaton’s first experience with racism within
animal welfare came when she was turned down as a transport volunteer for an independent
rescue.
“The rescue person basically said, ‘I don’t know who you are or what you want to do with my
animals,’” says Akisha, who at the time was the only full-time Black attorney in animal welfare
and was working to draft anti-cruelty laws. “I didn’t tell her I was an attorney; I just thought, ‘I’m
not going through all of this just to be a volunteer here.’ So I found another group to volunteer
for instead.
“You know, it takes a lot to even get to that point and then to be rejected… People feel like
they’ve wasted their time and put themselves in a worse position for taking a risk.”
When senior director of culture and talent José Ocaño worked at a shelter in Florida, he didn’t
feel directly discriminated against. He was shocked one day, however, when a white man in a
senior leadership role told him to break up a group of Black college students who were
volunteering.
“My mouth dropped,” José says. “The way he said it was just so blasé. I didn’t do what he asked
because it was wrong, and I didn’t know how to even do something like that.”
The national scene
Though both José and Marc saw how prevalent racism was within their respective shelters, they
didn’t really appreciate how rare they were in the animal welfare movement until they attended
national conferences.
“I remember walking into the ballroom, and no one looked like me,” José says. “It wasn’t until I
met Marc at an American Pets Alive! conference that I was like ‘there’s another guy here, and
he’s a brown guy like me.’ That was the first time I saw myself having a place in the
movement.”
Community cat programs (CCP) outreach specialist Leah Long felt the same when she attended
the Best Friends National Conference in 2017.
“I had heard the message of Best Friends and it matched my ideals,” she says. “But I was
surprised to find the audience was overwhelmingly white.”
Adoption assumptions and barriers
Leah was also surprised when she realized the lengthy adoption applications common in the
industry were often used to screen out people who didn’t fit into certain socioeconomic or racial
categories. Worse than that was the resistance from the shelter and rescue world to change that
process.
“I was at a shelter where we were trying to implement open adoptions, but people kept falling
into a pattern of denying adoptions for nit-picky reasons,” she says. “I remember a Black family
had come to adopt a dog, and as I walked into the administrative area I saw six staffers looking
up the family’s address on Google Maps to see if they had a fence. And they had just adopted
to a very young white couple who didn’t have a fence! There were just these conscious efforts to
put up barriers.”
“I heard millions of times ‘I only adopt to people like me who really care about animals,’” says
Marc. “I don’t think they were even thinking of it as being racist, but they really meant the white
lady with 16 dogs and 11 cats.”
CCP coordinator Dinah Sepulveda often finds herself sticking up for other Black or mixed-race
people because she is commonly mistaken as one of those “people like us.”
“People mistake me for a white woman and then they feel free to share some alarming
opinions,” she says. “I remember one man talking about a neighborhood and he said, ‘there
aren’t a lot of our people over there.’ When I told him I’m half Black, the look on his face was
one of embarrassment and shock.
“That happens a lot, where people are looking at me like we’re on the same team, so they feel
safe telling me these things,” she says. “It’s difficult to even know how to respond professionally
to that.”
A person’s socioeconomic status is also frequently used to judge adopters as well as members
of the public who receive services. Carol Reyes, a CCP coordinator in Riverside County,
California, experienced the latter when she was asked to help trap cats for spay and neuter at a
mobile home park.
“I was warned ahead of time by the white woman who was feeding the cats that it was too
dangerous an area to go into,” she says. “She thought that because the people who lived there
were Black and Hispanic and they were low-income.”
Just because a family is low-income does not mean they are bad homes, says Dinah, recalling
that her parents couldn’t afford to take their pets to the vet when she was growing up. But there
was little doubt that they considered them part of the family.
There was little doubt that the families in the mobile home park felt that way, either.
“They were thrilled to have their cats spayed and neutered and they clearly loved them,” Carol
says. “Two little boys in particular were eager to help and wasted no time pulling their kitty out of
the trap when I came to return him.”
Though she talked to the feeder afterwards and the woman ended up trapping with Carol later,
“she invited other people along, too. I think she still didn’t feel safe.”
The reality of systemic racism
While not everyone of color lives in a bad neighborhood, Akisha points out that everyone has a
level of implicit bias and that has crept into the fabric of our processes in animal welfare.
“When we think of racism, we tend to think of hatred and the KKK, but these systemic biases
are really what set the groundwork and are detrimental on a daily basis,” Akisha says. “Bias
doesn’t make someone a bad person, but it's a rare Black person who will jump through extra
hoops by facing increased scrutiny at a shelter when they can get animals in other places while
being treated with more respect.”
“We have to remember that even though our work focuses on animals, we also work with their
people,” Dinah says. “And we are doing both people and animals a disservice with these
assumptions.”
Circling back to our determination to be more inclusive, diverse and equitable, Leah says it
best.
“We have to begin asking ourselves not just why we are making certain decisions in our work.
We have to ask why people of color would want to get involved in a movement where they are
treated as less than they deserve, as part of a problem when they are really part of a solution?”
Liz Finch
Senior Writer, Best Friends Network
Best Friends Animal Society
WHY WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT RACISM,
PREJUDICE AND DOG RESCUE
AUGUST 15, 2017 https://redemptiondogs.com/2017/08/15/racism-animal-rescue-
why-we-need-to-talk-about-this/
Let me start by saying, I am a cis-gendered white female that has been in the rescue
community since 2006. I have worked alongside many wonderful rescuers, met
amazing adopters and likeminded volunteers. Toronto has a very low homeless dog
population, and despite Ontario’s dismal animal cruelty laws (many haven’t been
revisited since the 1890’s) and the insanity of breed specific legislation laws,
Toronto is a pretty OK place to be a dog.
However, throughout my ten plus years in rescue, I’ve continued to notice one
consistent thing: it’s a lot of white women. Like a lot. Myself included. As years go
by and I continue to photograph families and meeting new volunteers, the lack of
racial diversity is unsettling. Out of the hundreds of families I’ve photographed,
less than 10% of those photos have people of color in them. It is whitewashed and it
is wrong. I’ve truly struggled with this, often venting to friends that the community
isn’t diverse at all – mostly because it isn’t.
Here are the three major things I’ve witnessed in rescue:
Discrimination Against Adopters
In my early years in rescue I’ve encountered some uncomfortable experiences.
Particularly refusal to adopt to families based on their ethnicity. “Don’t Chinese people
eat dogs?” “Oh they will just feed the dog curry” or “You can’t trust immigrant families with
dogs!”.
It further extended to “Oh! We have an application from a Jewish family, we’ll
charge them more, they’ve got money”.
Making sweeping generalizations about families is horrible. If there were multiple
applicants for a dog, it always seemed the white family took priority. It would
always be a quick, passing remark. I was barely an adult when I started
encountering this or overhearing it. I wish at the time I was better with
confrontation but instead I distanced myself and focused my efforts elsewhere. I can
assure you today if I were to come across the same statements, my issues with
confrontation are long gone and have a zero tolerance for this.
The Saviour Complex
So many of the dogs that come into rescue come from poor areas. Whether it’s the
rural United States or the city streets of South American cities, race is always
implied. Many of the dogs that come into rescue in Toronto come from poor areas –
whether it’s the rural United States or the busy streets of South America or Asian
cities. No one ever thinks to give dogs who look abused or neglected a second
opinion – no matter where they came from, whoever owned them was a bad person.
There’s refusal to acknowledge the socio-economic conditions these dogs came
from. Many times, these dogs were loved, but their families couldn’t afford to feed
themselves, never mind a dog, and therefore had to turn them out to the streets.
The most important aspect in these situations is that a Canadian, a white woman,
rescued it. She plucked them out of their horrible conditions, she deserves praise.
Not every homeless dog came from an abusive home, many do yes, but not all.
A Community That Isn’t Inclusive
While I continue to question myself and those around me as to why there is a lack
of diversity in rescue, including volunteers and adopters, many questions remain.
The ideal home for rescue dogs, is that of a wealthy one. If a dog isn’t in a home
with a backyard, a million toys, pristinely kept, then it’s not good enough. It would
be helpful if rescues posted that they are open and accepting, that is if they truly
are. Accepting of race, nationalities, LGBTQ2S, religion and more. In today’s
world, that can’t be implied. It needs to be stated.
When I told my friend Rodney, who is a person of color out of California, about
this article he said: “I didn’t know that was a thing but now I think about it I never
see pictures of anyone who isn’t Caucasian adopting a dog. Certainly no stories.”
Are people of color simply not adopting or are they opting to go to breeders because
rescues give them such a hard time?
Change Is Necessary
While I continue to question this issue, as to why there is a lack of diversity in
rescue, including volunteers and adopters. The ideal home for rescue dogs, that is in
the mind of a lot of people, is a wealthy home. If a dog isn’t in a home with a
backyard, a million toys, pristinely kept, then it’s not good enough. Moving past
appearances, there is something that the rescue community fails to do: be inclusive.
It would be helpful if rescues posted that they are open and accepting, that is if they
truly are. Accepting of all races, nationalities, LGBTQ2S, religions, and more. In
today’s world, that can’t be implied. It needs to be stated.
The future of animal rescue is working with the community, not against it. That
means helping disadvantaged communities keep their pets, building affordable vet
clinics, and providing resources and education. The days of white women swooping
into communities over run with homeless animals, is far from over. However race
and gender shouldn’t matter one way or the other in the rescue world, yet somehow
it does.
I realize that being a white female has given me privileges. I have the time and
resources to dedicate to pursuing my passions, in this case helping dogs. Even
having a dog, and affording the daily extra costs of having a dog (or two, in this
case) is not something everyone can afford to do.
It’s time to start talking about inclusivity in the rescue community as a whole. We
must continue to help animals but keep in mind the myriad of socio-economic
circumstances that make animals homeless. We’re not playing devils and angels
here. Being compassionate should apply to people and animals. They shouldn’t be
separate.
You cannot end the homelessness of animals if you do not address the root of that
problem. Oppression that keeps people in poverty, is that same oppression that
keeps animals on the streets and dying in shelters.
We Want To Hear From You
If you’re a POC or LGBTQ who has had an experience with rescue that they would
like to remark on, whether adopting or volunteering, we’d love to hear from you!
Your voice matters.
E-mail nicole (at) redemptiondogs.com
Dog adoptions and sales soar during
the pandemic
Shelters, rescues and breeders report increased demand as Americans try
to fill voids with canine companion
By Kim Kavin
August 12, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. PDT
The Cabbage Patch Kids craze of 1985. The Tickle Me Elmo mania of 1996. To
understand what has been happening with the sales and adoptions of real, live puppies
and dogs during the novel coronavirus pandemic, you have to think back to buying
frenzies that consumed the consciousness of the entire nation.
“Within my circle of friends, there are at least five people who have gotten a puppy,”
says Tess Karaskevicus, a schoolteacher from Springfield, Va., whose boxer puppy,
Koda, joined her family on May 28. “It’s been great. We’ve been having friends come
over and play with the puppy while we socially distance. They’re getting a puppy dosage
of happiness. It’s been really amazing.”
What began in mid-March as a sudden surge in demand had, as of mid-July, become a
bona fide sales boom. Shelters, nonprofit rescues, private breeders, pet stores — all
reported more consumer demand than there were dogs and puppies to fill it. Some
rescues were reporting dozens of applications for individual dogs. Some breeders were
reporting waiting lists well into 2021. Americans kept trying to fill voids with canine
companions, either because they were stuck working from home with children who
needed something to do, or had no work and lots of free time, or felt lonely with no way
to socialize.
At the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Los Angeles, a nonprofit shelter,
adoptions were double their usual rate in late June, with 10 or 13 adoptions a day,
president Madeline Bernstein said. A waiting list had formed for certain types of dogs,
and for puppies in general, because so few were left in the shelter.
“My inventory is low,” she said. “All the shelters are in the same boat, but people still
want to adopt.”
Bernstein saw the continuing demand as a second wave happening within the
coronavirus crisis. The first wave, when the virus initially struck, consisted of people
fostering and adopting in part to help clear the shelters before they had to shut down.
Months later, she said, a different type of adopter has come forward.
“There’s been a realization that this is going to go on for a while,” she said. “People will
not be getting on planes to travel. They’re going to plan staycations or driving vacations
that are more amenable to pets. So they’ll adopt now. This is like a second group of
people on a whole other timeline.”
On the other side of the country, at Animal Care Centers of NYC, about 25 percent of the
people who agreed to take in foster dogs temporarily at the start of the pandemic had
adopted them permanently by late June. Usually, that foster-turned-adopter figure is 10
percent, said Katy Hansen, director of marketing and communications.
And the New York shelter was seeing lower-than-usual return rates on adopted dogs,
she added. More adoptions may be working out, she said, in part because of the way the
virus forced shelters to change their processes. There have always been pre-adoption
forms to fill out in most parts of the country, along with things like home checks and
reference calls to verify adopters’ information — some adopters have joked in the past
that it’s easier to bring home a child than a dog. Now there are more virtual touch points
added to the pre-adoption process.
“There’s so much more interaction with the shelters before the adoption,” Hansen said.
“You’re getting people who have found the animal on your website or on social media,
have seen the video, read the bio, sent the email, asked for more information, then we
do the virtual meet-and-greet — there’s a lot more interaction before the adoption
happens. It shows that the person is really invested.”
Breeders, too, reported unusual levels of business continuing into midsummer. Hank
Grosenbacher, a breeder of Pembroke Welsh corgis who owns the Heartland Sales
auction in Cabool, Mo. — where commercially licensed breeders often buy and sell dogs
as breeding stock — said that as of late June, some breeders were investing more heavily
than usual in puppies they could raise into breeding-age dogs. Other breeders were
reporting pet stores buying full litters of puppies that hadn’t been born yet, putting the
money down in advance just to try to keep inventory in the pipeline going forward.
“That means everyone thinks this boom will go on at least another 60 to 90 days,”
Grosenbacher said. “For most breeders, business is the best it’s ever been.”
Joe Watson, CEO of Petland, which operates dozens of pet stores in the United States,
says demand was so strong in May and June that the breeders the company usually
works with saw a flood of new buyers for puppies.
“Demand for all pets were strong in May and June and continues thus far,” Watson said
in mid-July.
Many consumers caught in the demand crunch have found themselves navigating the
shopper’s equivalent of an obstacle course to bring home a dog from any type of source.
Natalia Neerdaels, a scientist from Sea Ranch, Calif., tried for weeks to adopt a dog from
a rescue group while she and her husband, who is in the tech business, were both
working from home alongside their 11-year-old daughter. Neerdaels said she contacted
nonprofit groups from the San Francisco Bay area all the way up the West Coast to
Oregon. All of them were overwhelmed with applications.
“The majority, when I got a reply, said they just didn’t have enough dogs,” Neerdaels
said. “They said: ‘You’re too late. Don’t even leave your name.’”
She ended up paying $1,375 for a toy poodle puppy on Craigslist. The family named her
Cala Lili.
“She’s now 11 weeks old, and she’s wonderful,” Neerdaels said. “We are very happy. I
had wanted to help a dog, to rescue, but it wasn’t possible.”
Ginger Mitchell of Grand Junction, Colo., also came up empty in her initial search. She
could find larger dogs in her state’s shelters, but the 68-year-old retiree didn’t want a
German shepherd or pit bull.
She turned to the Internet, too, and found a 3-year-old, 15-pound terrier mix named
Sammy on the PetSmart Charities website, which features adoptable dogs from around
the country. Sammy was in San Antonio with a nonprofit organization called CareTX
Rescue.
“This was in early April, and the airlines were starting to shut everything down,”
Mitchell said. “You couldn’t ship a dog on a flight that required a connection. It had to
be nonstop. There were no nonstops from San Antonio, so these lovely people drove
Sammy and some other dogs about five hours to Dallas-Fort Worth. They were
supposed to ship him here to Grand Junction on a direct flight from there, but both
flights were canceled. We ended up having to drive four hours over the mountains to
Denver. It was in the 20s, and there was snow on the ground. It took four attempts to
get him to us.”
Sammy was traumatized from the journey, Mitchell said, but soon settled in with her
and her husband, who is also retired.
“We had a lot of time to spend with him and bond,” she said. “If not for the pandemic,
we’d probably be traveling.”
Karaskevicus, who got her boxer puppy from a breeder her family knew, said her only
worry now is about what will happen with the upcoming school year. Both she and her
husband are teachers, and if schools reopen, she wants Koda to be ready for a new daily
routine without any people at home.
“I thought we should pretend to go to work every day in the garage or she’d have
separation anxiety,” Karaskevicus said. “So we crate trained her, just for like 45 minutes
a day, we’ll go in the front yard or grocery shopping just so she can get used to us being
away.”
Shelter directors, too, are wondering what will happen as Americans start returning to
school and work. Bernstein, in Los Angeles, said there could be an increase in dogs
being abandoned, or the dogs may have bonded so much with their families that they’ll
keep them forever. Like so many things with the coronavirus, the territory is uncharted.
Just as nobody predicted that the start of a pandemic would lead to a buying spree for
pet dogs, nobody is quite sure what the end of a pandemic will mean for the pups either.
“While we have general ideas and can make good guesses, we really don’t know how this
will turn out,” Bernstein said. “Nobody has ever done this before.”
Everyone Wants a Rescue Dog. Not
Everyone Can Have One.
“You get a maltipoo in here and you’re likely to see a blood bath,” a shelter director said.
By Kate Murphy
Ms. Murphy is a journalist.
June 29, 2019
HOUSTON — Jonathan Martinez was standing near an empty cage at the municipal
animal shelter here looking dejected. A 25-year-old accountant, he was getting married
soon and he and his fiancée wanted to make a dog a part of their new life together. But
every time he saw a dog he liked on an online database of lost or abandoned pets, it
would be gone by the time he got to the shelter.
Holding up his phone to show screenshots of two adorable terrier mix puppies, Mr.
Martinez said, “I saw them when I checked the website this morning but the rescue
people took them before the shelter even opened.” A shelter employee apologized and
told him the rescue group was shipping the puppies to Colorado for adoption.
“Why are they doing that?” Mr. Martinez said. “I’m right here ready to take a dog home
right now.”
Mr. Martinez is bumping up against an issue that is causing some consternation in the
animal welfare community. Over the past 15 years, rescue organizations have shipped
millions of shelter dogs from poorer communities in the South to wealthier places in the
Northeast, Pacific Northwest and Midwest, where stricter spay and neuter laws have
resulted in a dwindling supply.
Relocating rescue dogs “can be a lifesaving thing,” said Sandra Newbury, a veterinarian
and director of the shelter medicine program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
After all, overcrowding at shelters puts more animals at risk for euthanasia.
But she worries that things have gotten out of hand. Overzealous rescue organizations
and shelters, under pressure to increase their live-release rates, might be harming
animals as well as creating barriers to adoption. “Why would you ever put a dog through
transport if you could place it in the local community?” Dr. Newbury asked.
The journey can be perilous, especially for puppies and kittens, which are more
vulnerable to stress. Some animals have escaped from the vans transporting them and
been hit by passing cars. Others have overheated. In May, 26 dogs died from excessive
heat in a vehicle owned by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals while being shipped from Mississippi to Wisconsin.
The transporter may have a heart of gold or just be in it for the money. Shelters and
rescue groups sometimes pay transporters to take the dogs on the front end, while
others may pay to receive them. Adoption fees can top $500, as it is now fashionable to
adopt rescue animals. This is in part thanks to the A.S.P.C.A.’s ad campaign pairing
heartbreaking images of abandoned and abused animals with Sarah McLachlan singing
“Angel.” The ads, which began airing in 2007, generated more than $30 million for the
organization. Moreover, at a time when the news is filled with stories of migrant
children in cages, many people may see adopting a rescue pet as an easy way to take
feel-good action.
As a result, animal rescue has become a “retail operation,” said Greg Damianoff, director
of the Bureau of Animal Regulation and Care, Houston’s municipal shelter. Rescue
groups have been known to duke it out over the most desirable dogs like shoppers over a
marked-down Armani gown. “You get a maltipoo in here and you’re likely to see a blood
bath,” he said.
The hot commodities are the smaller, scruffy or fluffy dogs like the puppies Mr.
Martinez was after. Shelters bundle loads of these dogs, known as the “cute and
cuddlies” or easy-to-flip “flipper puppers,” with larger, older Labrador or pit bull mixes
that are harder to move.
Mr. Damianoff sees sending off animals that locals may want as the only way to save the
less desirable animals in his inventory. His shelter has a capacity of around 300 dogs
and sometimes gets as many as 150 in a day. “We’re not trying to exclude anyone, but
the whole thing is to get the animals out of here alive,” Mr. Damianoff said.
But as with many things that start with good intentions, there have been unsettling
consequences, chief among them the recent deaths. Even when the animals arrive safely,
they can carry parasites like heartworms and deadly diseases like parvovirus and
distemper, which then spread not only in the receiving shelters but also to pets in the
communities where the rescues are adopted.
Several states, including Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island,
have imposed more stringent entry requirements for rescue animals, like mandatory
examinations by a local vet and quarantines. But these regulations are easy to
circumvent. It’s not uncommon for rescue groups to take animals to neighboring states
to make the handoff or to coordinate adoptions online, animal control officials say,
making drops in parking lots in the dead of night.
In addition to relocating animals from less well-off areas of the mainland United States,
rescue groups have begun bringing in dogs from China, Egypt, Mexico, South Korea,
Thailand and Puerto Rico. United States Customs and Border Protection and the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have raised security and public health
concerns about this trend. In May, the C.D.C. suspended all imports of dogs from
Egypt after several rescue dogs arrived with rabies.
The stress of transport not only makes animals susceptible to disease but can also
contribute to behavioral problems. The dogs have often been abused, neglected or feral
before they land in a crowded and cacophonous shelter. And then they get loaded onto a
truck or airplane and transported hundreds or thousands of miles to another shelter or
foster home before they are eventually adopted. A loving home at the end of the line
sometimes isn’t enough to make up for all that trauma.
“As the years have gone by with the transport system, I started seeing so many
unsocialized dogs that were aggressive or scared of their own shadows,” said Kelley
Bollen, an animal behaviorist in Reno, Nev., who consults with shelters and people who
have adopted rescue animals. While some animals are resilient, others are not. “It’s
heartbreaking to have to explain to people who have just rescued this dog from the
South that this animal won’t be a normal pet,” she said. “I tell them, ‘We’re going to
work really hard to get this animal comfortable in your house with your family, but it’s
going to be a rough road that’s going to take patience, drugs and a lot of
understanding.’”
All this has led many animal welfare advocates to question the wisdom of “humane
relocation” and whether all the money that goes toward marketing, bundling and
ferrying animals might be better spent stemming the flow of dogs into shelters in poor
communities. Since up to 80 percent of dogs that end up in shelters are surrendered by
their owners or turned in as strays, there has been a growing movement to address
what’s preventing people from caring for their pets.
One example is the nonprofit group Emancipet in Austin, Tex., which focuses on
providing free or low-cost spaying and neutering and veterinary services. The group also
goes door-to-door to answer people’s pet-related questions.
“Ninety-nine percent of people have pets because they love them and will do right by
them if given education and the opportunity,” said Myles Chadwick, the group’s vice
president of consulting and training. Emancipet treats some 100,000 animals per year
and has contributed to a significant decline in Austin’s shelter population.
The influential pet charity Maddie’s Fund has recently invested millions in similar
programs. It is also working to reduce barriers to adoption, at a time when many rescue
groups require something comparable to an F.B.I. background check and spot home
inspections. Mr. Martinez said he was put off by the intrusiveness of the several-page
application required by a local rescue group. “I was like, ‘What is this? We’re trying to
give a dog a home,’” he said.
Mary Ippoliti-Smith, who serves on the executive leadership team at
Maddie’s Fund, said, “There are lots of people in our movement
making huge value judgments about where animals should go and who
should get what, who think poor people or homeless people shouldn’t
have animals, or families with children or people who work all day
shouldn’t have animals.” That’s not fair to the dogs or the people who
want to give them a home. “We love animals because of the
unconditional love they give back,” she added. “Why deny that to
anyone? Why would we assume someone’s ability to love an animal
would be any less than our own?”
Editors’ Picks
Female vets face “outright
discrimination” and sexism from
colleagues and clients
Implications for legal/ethical practice and sustainability of profession, say authors
Female vets routinely face “outright discrimination” and sexism from their
colleagues and clients, with few of them encouraged to rise up the hierarchy,
indicates a small qualitative and observational study, published online in Vet
Record.
This not only has implications for the sustainability of the profession, because three
out of four vet school graduates are women and rates of practitioner burnout are
high. But it also raises questions about the legality and ethics of practice, say the
authors.
They didn’t set out to focus on gender, they write, “but as the study progressed,
gender became an issue of such importance that it could not be ignored.”
They drew on semi structured interviews with 75 vets: 39 men and 36 women,
ranging in age from 25 to 63. They included practitioners with varying levels of
experience and in all three main types of practice: small animal (30); large animal
(34); and equine (12).
The interviews were accompanied by observations during practice visits, including
during consultations and surgery, as well as exchanges in staff kitchens and
corridors.
The authors then carried out a thematic analysis to gauge how particular narratives
were used, consciously or not, to maintain or disrupt the prevailing status quo at
work.
Their analysis revealed “highly significant” client sexism, with clients often
demanding a male vet or insisting on a second opinion from “one of the boys.”
These attitudes were rarely challenged by senior (male) vets, “partly because of
their being oblivious to the problems, but also, presumably, for fear of upsetting the
client, suggest the authors.
Some of the interviewees did seem to be outwardly sensitive to gender issues,
yet were unaware of their own sexism.
The researchers cite an example of a male large animal practitioner who suggested
that chauvinism was dying out, but then went on to say: ‘They [women] can...use
their charm in situations, which do require some physical strength to actually just
get the farmer to help’.
Issues of physical weaknesses were frequently expressed by both sexes, particularly
in relation to large animal work, despite it often being a question of technique rather
than strength, note the researchers. Once again, this view was rarely challenged.
The narrative of an enforced choice between career or family was often subscribed
to by both sexes, but was “entirely absent from male accounts, as were issues of
future fatherhood,” point out the authors.
“These assumed responsibilities then become conflated (unproblematically) with
either the sheer impossibility, or lack of desire, for women to seek senior positions
in their practices,” a viewpoint that is reinforced by women’s self-deprecation and
the long working hours culture of the profession, they add.
And with one notable exception, they found once female vets had children, they
were assumed to be on the ‘mommy track’ and were no longer taken seriously by
the practice, manifest in no longer being given complex cases or considered for
promotion.
These findings are important, insist the authors, because of “the potentially ethical
and legal implications of practices that conflict with equal opportunity policies and
values.”
But more than that: “Often female vets were subject to outright sex discrimination.”
This will only worsen the risk of burnout, which is estimated to affect one in five
female vets within five years of graduation, they suggest.
Currently, few women work in large animal practices, hospitals, or academic
research, say the authors. But “vets do not readily recognise these issues and some
even refuse to acknowledge their existence.”
All this has implications for recruitment and retention, and ultimately the
sustainability of the profession, they suggest.
Women themselves don’t seem to want to challenge gender hierarchies and
entrenched masculine cultures at work either, suggesting that gender awareness
training both in management and the veterinary college curriculum is needed, say
the authors.
“This could raise issues of discrimination around gender and other closely related
problems such as age, so that students are equipped to recognise and challenge
discourses of limitation and discrimination before they become normalised,
internalised, and entrenched,” they conclude.
Commenting on the findings, Daniella Dos Santos, British Veterinary Association
Junior Vice President, said: “This study provides further evidence that sex
discrimination is an ongoing issue for veterinary professionals.
“The results also chime with our own research on discrimination in the veterinary
profession, which found that sex discrimination was the most common type
reported (44% of incidents) and is particularly prevalent in academic settings and
in production animal, equine, and mixed practices.”
She added: “It is completely unacceptable that so many women in the veterinary
team continue to experience discrimination not just from clients but from members
of our own profession. The veterinary team must become a safe and supportive
environment for everyone.”
09/09/2019
Notes for editors
Gendered practices in veterinary organisations doi 10.1136.vr.104994
Journal: Vet Record
Link to Academy of Medical Sciences labelling system:
https://press.psprings.co.uk/AMSlabels.pdf
Peer reviewed? Yes
Evidence type: Observational; qualitative
Subjects: People
Link to research: https://vetrecord.bmj.com/lookup/doi/10.1136/vr.104994