Ask a shelter worker what’s the most difficult moment in their job. In an open-admission, municipal shelter, you’re likely to get one answer- euthanasia. When a vivid life sits in front of you with its bright, shiny eyes, ending it with your own hands is one of the toughest things for any human being. The most natural, intuitive, and straight-forward question therefore emerges: Why don’t we stop doing this?
In some parts of the world, this idea has been turned into reality. Countries like India, Taiwan, Italy, Croatia, and Portugal have made euthanizing healthy animals illegal.
However, the sad reality is that shelter animal intake usually outpaces adoption, including in most of the above-mentioned no-kill countries. This is also the case for most of the regions inside the US. While there are places where shelter animal adoption can catch up with the pace of animal intake, this is not a common case.
Abandoned animals don’t just disappear and letting the number of animals in one shelter increase infinitely is not a sustainable solution. Disastrous overcrowding is happening across the US, and brings stress to both animals and shelter workers. Taiwan, where no-kill is put into law since 2018, is now having a nationwide crisis of shelter overcrowding: Shelters are keeping twice as many animals as their theoretical maximum capacity, and the workload of shelter veterinarians exceeds the legal maximum in multiple counties. In countries where no-kill has been implemented for a longer period (ex. Italy since 1991), the outcome remains controversial, with reports showing shelter dogs living under life-long inhumane conditions.
Back Onto the Street
Together with overcrowding, another common effect of the no-kill policy is the increase of stray animals, likely due to a combination of shelters’ passive resistance to take more, insufficient resources for animal trapping, and alternative programs that release animals back onto the street. While pinning down a concrete number is understandably difficult, some estimates claim that the number of stray dogs in Italy is as high as 500-700 thousand, and >90% of residents recognize free-roaming animals as a problem. These stray dogs commonly suffer from starvation, injury, illness, and human abuse. In India, where shelter euthanasia is banned and stray animals are extremely common, the chance of a new-born stray dog surviving to 7-months old is as low as 19%.
One measure commonly adopted together with no-kill is the “trap-neuter-release” program, where stray animals are released after being sterilized, either back to their original location or new ones. The aim is to reduce the population without euthanasia. However, despite having been implemented for decades, whether this kind of program can really reduce the population remains questionable. Some studies reported a successful reduction in population while others didn’t. A common characteristic between the “successful” studies is a high “removal” rate: In cases where animals inside one region did decrease throughout the period of time when the trap-neuter-release program was conducted, around 50% of animals were actually removed by euthanasia, adoption, or transportation to other regions. In studies where the initial and final population was reported, the population is actually either unchanged or increased when adoption is not taken into account. In support of this observation, scientists have shown that to decrease the number of stray cats, we need to consistently neuter >75% of the total population for multiple years. Whether this number is realistic depends on the region’s condition, and should be taken into account whenever this kind of program is considered.
Some Animals are More Equal than Others
Stray animals have also become a concern for wildlife preservation. When released back into the wilderness, cats and dogs can pose threat to the native species on multiple aspects, including directly preying on them, competing with them on resources like foods and spaces, and spreading new diseases. In other words, they become the so-called “invasive species“, which means the species was artificially introduced and causes harm to the new environment.
In 2014, 201 conservation groups across the US signed a joint letter in opposition to the trap-neuter-release policy, citing their concerns about feral cats’ threat to wildlife. Scientists estimated that unowned cats kill 0.9-2.7 billion birds per year inside the US based on the number of cats inside the US, the ratio of cats that hunt wildlife, and their typical predatory behavior. Conservationists commonly attribute cats to be the main reason behind the extinction of 33 bird species. It should be noted that this number is somehow anecdotal, and in the real world, it is challenging to parse out how much one factor contributes to the extinction of a species. It is therefore unlikely that we can pin down a concrete number on how many species are threatened by cats or dogs across the globe.
What science can do is to tell us what happens inside a small, observable area. Observation in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park revealed cats’ presence led to a significant decrease in native species including California quail, California thrashers, and harvest mice. Research conducted in a natural park in Colorado?? showed similar results for dogs: in areas where dogs are prohibited, more prairie dogs, bobcats, and mule deer were found. In Taiwan Shoushan National Nature Park, the population of Reeves’ muntjacs and Masked palm civets decreased stunningly, following the significant increase in stray dog population after the public no-kill outcry. An early report from New Zealand recorded an incident where one unregistered German Shepherd killed around 500 Kiwi birds over a couple of months.
While the above-mentioned data is small-scale compared to the whole picture, they provide us with some food for thought. Is releasing pets back into the environment a humane way to treat “animals”, if the word’s definition is broader than “cats and dogs”?
Where Do we go?
With all being said, I still hope to jump back to the very first scene. An innocent life is sitting in front of you. Putting it into death is, and should forever be, a painful and difficult call. Above all the controversies surrounding this issue, one thing almost everyone agrees on is that euthanasia should be the last resort under situations of utmost necessity. It should only be chosen when all other choices will inevitably lead to a “worse” outcome.
While what can be regarded as “worse” is a philosophical question above the scope of this article, what I believe everyone should do is to know more about the objective reality. Before making an advocacy or decision, make sure to ask:
- Is the number of abandoned animals greater than adopted animals in my region?
- If so, what are the alternative measures shelters take instead of euthanasia?
- What will the cats’ and dogs’ lives be like under these measurements?
- Is there a potential impact to other living beings?
The answers differ across regions, and what decisions should be made differ between each individual. The only decision we shouldn’t make is to turn a blind eye to difficult questions, merely to save our own feelings instead of animals’ lives.
About the Author
Jane is a current PhD student in the department of small animal medicine & surgery, University of Georgia. She got her DVM back in Taiwan, but have now pretty much forgot how to do clinical stuff. Currently trying to learn a thing or two about proteomic and bioinformatic coding for her PhD project.
