We can feel the holiday season lurking around the corner, hawking its sparkly greeting cards and bow tied boxes. We dread the day you start to see Christmas tree stands pop up on every corner and hear jingly music playing everywhere you go. As you can probably already tell, we're not big fans of this time of year. Don't get us wrong, we love the cheer that lights up chilly December, but to the directors of a no-kill animal shelter in NYC, holidays spell little more than disaster for thousands of momentarily-loved pets in Manhattan alone. Christmas is the main offender, but this goes for Valentine's Day, Easter, and birthdays, too.
It starts out innocently. Well-intentioned but severely uninformed gift givers buy puppies, kittens, rabbits, and so on for their kids and significant others. These cuddly presents always make a big splash, but the novelty wears off before long and those gifts end up abandoned at kill shelters or sold to even less qualified pet owners via Craigslist a few weeks or months later. (Want to see for yourself? Check out the Pets section on Craigslist around mid-January). Animal abandonment is a year round problem too, of course. Dogs and cats are dumped on the street, left at kill shelters, and worse every day. Summer is the "busy season," as puppy and kitten populations explode and those doing the abandoning think it's more humane to offload their furry family members when it's warm out. Animal abandonment is a huge, gross phenomenon, and it's why our zany rescue community exists. But like many non-profits, we we wish we didn't exist. That is to say we wish the world was a kinder, more informed place where there was no need for our services.
We run Social Tees Animal Rescue in the East Village. We can't tell you how many people walk into our shelter and ask where our animals come from, how they could be abandoned in the first place, and why there are so many. Most of them gasp or look puzzled when we say "the kill shelter," having never even heard the term. We should back up a minute for those of you who are having the same reaction now. There are what we call "kill shelters" all over the country that euthanize animals every night in order to make room for the wave of abandoned animals that will arrive the next day. In New York City, Animal Care and Control (the ACC for short) is the city-run kill shelter with three locations, each in a different borough. The ACC has a very bad rap, but it exists because our system is broken, not because the people who work there are evil. In fact, a number of them are animal lovers like us just trying to make a difference, just trying to provide the animals that end up there with the care they deserve, and just doing their jobs. We run a small private non-profit animal shelter that takes dogs and cats out of kill shelters and provides them with safe haven and veterinary attention before finding them proper, responsible, loving forever homes. All of our dogs are in foster homes instead of cages. We don't ever euthanize for space reasons -- we hold onto an animal for as long as it takes to find the animal a family. There are many rescue groups like ours.
So why are there so many abandoned animals? The go-to reason is pet shops. They're the ones cranking out more and more animals via puppy mills etc. while millions are euthanized every year (2.7 million in the U.S., to be exact, according to the Humane Society). Breeders pose a similar problem. Anyone who walks into a pet store with money in his pocket can leave with whatever he wants. We always loved visiting pet stores as kids and still get a guilty thrill out of walking through the door and seeing all of the critters on display, but pet shops exist to make money, not to promote animal well-being. Pet shops encourage people to devalue life. You need a license to drive a car but not to care for a living breathing creature. It doesn't matter if a customer is qualified to keep a puppy, kitten, gecko, or rabbit alive. In fact, if one dies, another may be needed to replace it... Not that they're going out of their way to sell animals to unqualified buyers, but if you think about it, It's actually a conflict of interest for pet store owners to make sure their customers know how to care for their purchases. Planned obsolescence is not an unfamiliar concept for most of us, but we tend to think of it as one that applies mostly to material goods like electronics and automobiles. The day you wake up and realize that this concept fuels most of the pet industry as well is a terrifying one. We're talking about life here, not televisions.
It starts out innocently. Well-intentioned but severely uninformed gift givers buy puppies, kittens, rabbits, and so on for their kids and significant others. These cuddly presents always make a big splash, but the novelty wears off before long and those gifts end up abandoned at kill shelters or sold to even less qualified pet owners via Craigslist a few weeks or months later. (Want to see for yourself? Check out the Pets section on Craigslist around mid-January). Animal abandonment is a year round problem too, of course. Dogs and cats are dumped on the street, left at kill shelters, and worse every day. Summer is the "busy season," as puppy and kitten populations explode and those doing the abandoning think it's more humane to offload their furry family members when it's warm out. Animal abandonment is a huge, gross phenomenon, and it's why our zany rescue community exists. But like many non-profits, we we wish we didn't exist. That is to say we wish the world was a kinder, more informed place where there was no need for our services.
We run Social Tees Animal Rescue in the East Village. We can't tell you how many people walk into our shelter and ask where our animals come from, how they could be abandoned in the first place, and why there are so many. Most of them gasp or look puzzled when we say "the kill shelter," having never even heard the term. We should back up a minute for those of you who are having the same reaction now. There are what we call "kill shelters" all over the country that euthanize animals every night in order to make room for the wave of abandoned animals that will arrive the next day. In New York City, Animal Care and Control (the ACC for short) is the city-run kill shelter with three locations, each in a different borough. The ACC has a very bad rap, but it exists because our system is broken, not because the people who work there are evil. In fact, a number of them are animal lovers like us just trying to make a difference, just trying to provide the animals that end up there with the care they deserve, and just doing their jobs. We run a small private non-profit animal shelter that takes dogs and cats out of kill shelters and provides them with safe haven and veterinary attention before finding them proper, responsible, loving forever homes. All of our dogs are in foster homes instead of cages. We don't ever euthanize for space reasons -- we hold onto an animal for as long as it takes to find the animal a family. There are many rescue groups like ours.
So why are there so many abandoned animals? The go-to reason is pet shops. They're the ones cranking out more and more animals via puppy mills etc. while millions are euthanized every year (2.7 million in the U.S., to be exact, according to the Humane Society). Breeders pose a similar problem. Anyone who walks into a pet store with money in his pocket can leave with whatever he wants. We always loved visiting pet stores as kids and still get a guilty thrill out of walking through the door and seeing all of the critters on display, but pet shops exist to make money, not to promote animal well-being. Pet shops encourage people to devalue life. You need a license to drive a car but not to care for a living breathing creature. It doesn't matter if a customer is qualified to keep a puppy, kitten, gecko, or rabbit alive. In fact, if one dies, another may be needed to replace it... Not that they're going out of their way to sell animals to unqualified buyers, but if you think about it, It's actually a conflict of interest for pet store owners to make sure their customers know how to care for their purchases. Planned obsolescence is not an unfamiliar concept for most of us, but we tend to think of it as one that applies mostly to material goods like electronics and automobiles. The day you wake up and realize that this concept fuels most of the pet industry as well is a terrifying one. We're talking about life here, not televisions.