Are there any cat haters working at cat shelters? It is a thought and it worries me. We, the public, would naturally presume that all shelter staff are cat lovers or at least animal lovers or even less than that: neutral in respect of animals. I would have thought that the person doing the hiring of staff would ensure that new employees had a track record of working in animal welfare that demonstrated a love of animals. But is this happening? How good are the hiring and firing procedures in animal shelters? Charitable organisations are not like hard-nosed business environments where hiring is liable to be more strictly managed.
Let’s say you are a cat hater and you want to kill cats. Yes, there are people like that. A good way to do it is at a cat shelter because there is killing going on everyday and judgments are made everyday as to how many are killed and which cats are killed etc. etc. There is a lot of killing going on judging by the overall statistics.
The amount of cats killed at shelters is very much dictated by the decision-making of individuals working at the shelters. It is about selections, assessments and so on. There are plenty of poor decisions but are they deliberately poor?
The mentality at a cat shelter can be one which says, “we are going to fight to save lives and kill an absolute minimum of cats”. These shelters want to be true no-kill.
At the other end of the scale there are shelters that don’t care about killing cats. It is just processing. There is a defeatist attitude. As Harvey says, the killing happens fast before the cat’s owner has a chance to protest. These places get away with it because there is an acceptance of mass euthanasia at many animal shelters and it does not matter if it is the USA, UK or Europe. Although to be fair there is more killing going on in the USA because there are more cats in the USA and the highest percentage of cats to people anywhere in the world is in the USA.
Against a background of lots of killing, a cat hater is in the right place, isn’t he? He can decide to kill cats and kill them with impunity. No one will ask questions.
It is like a person who likes to kill people joining the military and going to Afghanistan. He can shoot up the Taleban to his heart’s content. Mercenaries come to mind. There are quite a lot of people who like to be involved in killing and they find the environment to do it, legally.
My guess is that there are some cat haters working at cat shelters because of lax hiring policies or fraudulent CV’s that misrepresent the person. A lot of people create fake CVs and remodel themselves. I don’t think there are many cat haters working at shelters.
The reason why I asked the question is because I wonder if one reason why there is so much euthanasia at animal shelters is because some staff are not genuinely concerned with cat welfare and worse: they hate cats. And the rate of killing is not decreasing.
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