Help Reclaim Our Nation's Shelters

Nathan Winograd

Help reclaim our nation’s shelters

To help animals, we’ve been told to do two things: 1. Sign petitions on Facebook and 2. Send money to the large, national organizations. The problem is that Facebook petitions are often ignored and therefore mostly ineffective. And when it doesn’t simply sit in already bloated bank accounts, the money donated to the large, national organizations just as often is used to hinder, rather than assist, the cause in ending the killing of animals in shelters. Together, the ASPCA and HSUS take in roughly $300,000,000 per year yet have never created a No Kill community.

To save lives, animals in shelters need for people to do two different things: 1.Directly take animals out of harm’s way through rescue and 2. Reform shelters through legislation, litigation, and political advocacy. In short, D.I.Y. Like the activist who started a No Kill movement in his community where he took on not only an entrenched shelter director, but also the mighty ASPCA—and won: http://bit.ly/11qcz9q Or the animal lover who became informed about the No Kill movement and immediately walked into his local shelter, announced, "There will be no more killing in the shelter," and then proceeded to make it come true. Or the animal rescuer who almost singlehandedly created the infrastructure necessary for her local shelter to go No Kill: http://exm.nr/1xLaSAG Or the husband-and-wife team that began marketing shelter animals and holding offsite adoption events, resulting in adoption rates of over 95 percent for their community: http://bit.ly/1pemuxi Or even the local volunteer group who took over operations of their shelter and now save well over 90% of the animals: http://bit.ly/1tsAFgC. There are many ways to effectively join the No Kill revolution. Here’s one: create a blog that acts as a watchdog over sheltering issues in your community or state. Two examples: 

NJ Animal Observer who writes about shelter issues in his home state of New Jersey: http://njanimalobserver.wordpress.com/

Fix NC who writes about shelter issues in her home state of North Carolina: http://fixnc.wordpress.com/

We need less Facebook petitions and less check writing and more people willing to stand up and expose the truth. We need more people willing to directly save animals from shelters intent on killing them through rescue. And we need more people willing to walk the corridors of power to lobby for reform: http://bit.ly/RB7B5a