This is an interesting little story about a brand-new $75 million animal shelter which opened in Queens, New York City, which was designed to hold 72 dogs. You may flinch at the thought of that because it means that the costs is more than $1 million per dog although it is an initial cost I suppose and therefore you can’t really see it like that.
The New York Times states that it is at 210% capacity which means there are more than twice the number of rescue animals in the facility. They also report that there are “almost twice as many cats as there should be”.
It’s said that the shelter was in trouble even before it opened in late July. It is 50,000 ft² in size. “It’s a confluence of just terrible things happening all at once, and our shelters are not designed to house this many animals.”
The quote comes from Katy Hansen, a spokeswoman for Animal Care Centres of New York City. The shelter has spacious kennels for dogs and a skylight in the adoption room. There are dedicated rooms for cats to roam freely within. There are high ceilings and state-of-the-art veterinary facilities including a dental clinic. I suspect that that is because poor dental health is quite common for domestic cats. I think is in the top 10 most common illnesses which should make people think about the causes.
The likely cause is the food they eat. The best food for protecting dental health is a prey animal! I reckon if you did a survey on the wildcat ancestor of the domestic cat to check on their dental health you would find that their mouths are in perfectly good health compared to the health of the mouths of domestic cats because they feed on live cat food.
But that’s another story. But the story here is that it’s gone wrong for the shelter it seems to me. The story continues by saying that it was “tapped to take in 77 dogs displaced from a city-run Brooklyn shelter that closed for renovations. The story “showed dogs penned small kennels with shredded blankets and bedding, smeared in excrement, their water and food dishes empty and overturned.” And [there was] “an earsplitting cacophony of barking and the unpleasant odour of dog excrement.”
Further, “the roof leaked, the ventilation was horrendous [and] the gleaming promise of the new facility had crashed into the messy reality of shelter work”.
That’s just one month after opening. It doesn’t take long does it. Shiny facilities are nice but more important is management.
My thanks to Ann Althouse for reporting on this. She has access to the New York Times which I don’t. You have to subscribe these days to these online newspapers. If I did that with every newspaper that I read online I’d be broke very quickly. But I wouldn’t but I don’t want to shell out more money with little reward.
I think this story in the NYT highlights the problem with animal shelters which in turn highlights the problem with cat and dog caregiving. There would seem to be too many unwanted cats and dogs in NYC so even a brand-new shelter becomes a bit decrepit quite quickly. When are we going to sharpen up cat and dog ownership?
It seems that for as long as people can remember there have been too many unwanted cats and dogs and is not only in New York City that this problem occurs. It’s all over the world really. There are exceptions as sometime shelters are empty because the management have employed really clever ways to adopt out their animals. However, if you read about animal shelters the general cry from the administrators is that there are too many animals in the shelters.
This is a story that Nathan Winograd will pick up on. He is America’s greatest animal advocate in respect of shelter animals. He says that, in general, there is a need for better management of animal shelters. To use better techniques and methods to ensure that let animals come in and more animals go out. But progress has been achieved. Certainly the old days of 20 years ago look terrible now with much more euthanasia of shelter animals then.
There is an underlying story which is a minority of people are irresponsible cat and dog owners. They need to be educated to raise their standards. It is this minority that leads to overcrowded shelters. Is it possible to educate them in responsible companion animal husbandry?
