Nathan Winograd to Mark Watson - "Over 10 years, the National Council on Pet Population Study found that animals acquired as gifts would be least likely to be relinquished to shelters. They found that they stayed in their homes longer. It called into question the prevailing dogma, and since the National Council was made up of groups that championed killing, if there was a bias, it ran toward not adopting during the holidays.
I get the concerns, but there is nothing wrong with a spouse adopting an animal as a gift for a spouse or parents for children or adult children for their elderly parents, which is what I did as a shelter director. And not only did my shelter adopt out animals during the holidays, but we had a volunteer Santa Claus personally deliver the animal to the home. (A home visit without necessarily being considered one.)
But as late as 2009, HSUS was still publishing material telling people to wait until after the holidays to adopt, effectively condemning over half a million animals to certain death. And despite no evidence that animals adopted during December would be surrendered in January or February or tied to a tree in the backyard, there are still a lot of groups peddling that nonsense, once again causing animals to die.
But getting back to your main point. It doesn't matter to me whether it is December or July or April or September, our shelters can and should be the safe havens we want them to be. And we are not stuck in having to choose between a No Kill nation and what we have now, a system of death camps where animals are abused and then lose their lives by the millions. Nor do we have to choose between giving all animals away on the street or handing them out as gifts and killing them. But if that is the choice, I would choose the former each and every time, a fact we all would recognize if we were the ones facing the needle: www.nathanwinograd.com/
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