SAVING SHELTER ANIMALS AND CONTEMPLATING A WAY TO CHANGE THINGS....

EDITION OF TUESDAY, AUGUST 2, 2022 [PetPowellPress] Here we are at August 2 in a summer that has seen not only some days with record heat, but some days with, apparently, record euthanasia at city shelters.
There has to be a better way to handle the load of unwanted animals than “kill ‘em.” [I'll explain this happy dog later in this segment.]
We’ll take suggestions at [email protected] Keep reading through our Contemplation later in this edition. 
And, please, know this: There are shelter workers in Dallas and Fort Worth and throughout the area who are upset at the load of unwanted animals arriving at their facilities. Volunteers are aggrieved, too. You’ve probably seen their heartfelt appeals and concerns online. 
Dallas Animal Services and Fort Worth Animal Care and Control have been particularly blasted by overloaded facilities — people dumping pandemic animals, others dumping unwanted puppies and kittens that resulted from failure to control roaming dogs and cats. Spay and neuter is an answer to population control, but it’s not the only answer to stopping the killing.
Fort Worth Animal Care and Control has 4 segments on its opening page: Adoptable Pets, Lost & Found Pets, Foster a Pet and, dreadfully, Code Red Urgent Animals. But that’s the best way to let people know which animals are on the brink of death.
As I started writing this Tuesday morning, there were 43 dogs on the Code Red list. One of them is that 44-pound, 4-year-old mixed-breed with the great ears, Mila. She’s in Pod B at the FWACC North Campus.— she came in on July 1. For a month, nobody has wanted her. She’s #50570861. No other details about personality or circumstances of her incarceration at the city shelter. She’s a friggin’ statistic on the list to become a final statistic. 

The other Fort Worth dog is Bossy — he’s a 9-year-old Chihuahua fellow (#50338601) who came into the shelter on June 2. He’s on the southeastern side of Cowtown at the Chuck Silcox Animal Care & Adoption Center, one of the two facilities run by Fort Worth.
Here’s the LINK FOR BOTH Fort Worth shelters. And when you get to the Code Red animals, you know they have a target on ‘em, but the staffers would rather see them go to new, wonderful homes or find hope in a rescue group.
That brings us to Dallas Animal Services. On its opening page at www.bedallas90.org, the description of DAS reads that it “is one of the largest municipal animal shelters in the country, taking in any Dallas pet in need, regardless of space. DAS serves tens of thousands of pets and even more people within the city of Dallas each year.”

Tens of thousands of pets — save 90 percent and that still means a tragic number of animals are euthanized. 
There’s also this on the site: “DAS exceeded a 90% annual Live Release Rate for Fiscal Year 2020 (October 2019 – September 2020) while prioritizing lifesaving, public safety, quality of life and the family unit.”
So, here are two of the animals currently waiting in the care of Dallas Animal Services Shelter. The dog is Amelia (#A1102111) — her listing says she’s an American Pit Bull Terrier, her age is “young” and she doesn’t have an “arrived at shelter” date. But, frankly, these days, that’s a critical bit of information — call it a “how close is she to the end” date. YOU DON’T HAVE TO PAY TO ADOPT AMELIA. Just be a good human and show up and save her by giving her a wonderful home. See her listing HERE . Same clickspot you can see the scant info about this cat.
The cat doesn’t have a name — just a number A1154027 and we don’t know why the 6-month-old boy is in such a thick-barred cage. He’s a 7-pounder and growing, DAS says. There’s no adoption fee for this playful kitten,
CONTEMPLATION
ANIMAL ISSUES & HISTORY
I go way back in writing stories about the DAS and its “challenges" through the years — from the tiny depressing hold-‘em-’til-ya-kill-‘em dark and dreary chamber next to the Dallas Zoo to the glory of animal advocates and good citizens successfully pressuring City Hall to build a new, large, showplace of a shelter in the animal care world. It opened in 2008. 
Things went sour 2 years later.
A couple of paragraphs ago I referred to a cat that doesn’t have a name at DAS right now. It reminds me of another cat that didn’t have a name. And I'm still puzzled and concerned about the decision that allowed that nameless cat to die in the wall of the city’s shelter in May of 2010 — that’s right, more than 12 years ago and here we are in the time of overloaded shelters.
That cat’s death made a lot of difference in the way Dallas operated its brand new shelter. The city, for example, hired a professional shelter manager rather than promoting from within the city’s total workforce, i.e., a city employee is not always an interchangeable part. 

For years I've declared that there ought to be a statue on shelter property reminding Dallas taxpayers, visitors and animal advocates of the important sacrifice that cat made because of human — not humane — decisions. We should be honoring that terrified cat that lived for days in the wall because nobody would give the OK to break open the wall and save the cat no matter how much it cried or how much it scratched.

We don’t even have a description of that cat — it could have looked like the cat you have at your house, or the cats at my house. Or that cat mentioned above that needs a home.

There was a trial — the director of the shelter was found not guilty of felony animal cruelty. The not guilty verdict didn’t bring the cat back to life. Innocent and still dead, that cat.
 Now, in 2022, animals are dying in the shelter but not in the wall. They’re dying in what I believe is known as “The Lab.” That’s where they do the euthanasia, I’ve been told. Never visited it, never wanted to.
These dogs and cats on the city’s list for the day: They are alive and vibrant and purring or tail-wagging one moment as they’re petted as if they’re going to be someone’s pet, then, suddenly, after a puzzling sensation at needlepoint, they are so very irreversibly still — forever. A deed that is not undoable. Dead as the cat in the wall.

People outside the shelter and outside of animal advocacy may regard  the facility it as a place to “git rid of a problem” by dumping dogs and cats, puppies and kittens. Space is limited in shelters. They fill up quickly these days. If nobody is adopting, the only way to make space for the new arrivals is to euthanize animals already in the shelter.
Shelter’s can’t just turn the animals loose to wander the city, can they?

Lining up dogs and cats and killing them is despicable. But the problem starts with the idiot people who live a "don't care/so what" life. These full kennels and cagds may be a shelter challenge, but this is a people problem. And I just don’t know how to fix the people — they pay about as much attention to animal challenges as they do a “Spay and Neuter” campaign or a traffic light changing to yellow at an intersection. 

If anyone can figure out a way to rewire the brains and hearts of these people let me know.
In the meantime, perhaps it’s time to call for a really loud and impressive region-wide campaign to gently, sweetly, firmly educate people about how to stop killing animals because "we're going on vacation and I'm giving him to the shelter" or "the apartment manager found out we have a dog or a litter of kittens, or  …. wait, how about “Doesn’t get along with husband” — there’s another reason animals wind up in shelters. Dump the husband comes to mind.

Look, this is a matter of doing the right things for the sake of living beings. Bless these animals in shelters, their caregivers and the animals headed toward shelters at such a rotten time. Tell good people they, too, can help save the lives of animals — this needs to be a movement beyond all of us Animal Nuts — and I use that term proudly. I also think we ought to save humans. Maybe I’m an all-round nut. I suspect I am not alone.
—- Offer advice or a plan by clicking on ‘comment’ below or by emailing [email protected]—