Being a magazine piece, "What's a dog worth?" is rather lengthy, so I won't be able to take you through the whole thing. Regardless, it merits your attention, walking the reader through Los Angeles' animal control problem in more detail than I have ever seen, starting with the numbers:
The animal control agencies of L.A., including those of the city, the county, and two dozen smaller municipalities, put to death 104,841 animals last year, more than any other metropolitan area in the United States. About 35,000 of them were dogs, 55,000 were cats, and the rest a miscellany of rabbits, roosters, snakes, and guinea pigs. That is the good news. For decades the number has been so outlandish—250,000 a year in the 1970s, 150,000 a year in the ’80s, 125,000 in the ’90s—that even a decline this monumental somehow feels hollow. In 35 years Los Angeles has exterminated more than 5 million animals.The trend established, writer Jesse Katz delves into the system itself:
Few city agencies have been as historically underfunded as animal control, the stepchild of public safety. The department’s workforce is largely blue collar and, by necessity, desensitized. They are trained to move animals through the system, not to ponder the ambiguities of their mission. What this lumbering bureaucracy is being called on to do, though, is just that—to stop the machinery of the shelters, to consider the sanctity of each life inside. Such a radical turn would require a rethinking of ethical questions, of emotions, of biases, of habits, that we are rarely consistent about ourselves. Most of us recognize the wisdom of Gandhi’s proverb, that a nation can be judged by its treatment of animals. We do not, as a rule, condone their suffering. Still, we make exceptions all the time, for food, for entertainment, for clothing, for science, for tradition. Few of us have the zeal to lead purely vegan lives, rejecting every product that relies on the sacrifices of a nonhuman species. When it comes to the animals that serve as our pets—our best friends, our surrogate children—we profess a special affection. But we do not apply it equally. We romanticize some breeds and write off others, often on the most superficial of grounds. If the animals being killed in our shelters were shih tzus, the practice would have already come to a halt.I reject the use of the word "zeal" first and foremost, suggesting difficulty, if not irrationality in its connotative interpretations. Still, I'm glad that Katz recognizes that speciesism occurs not only on the level of human versus non-human, but also between various animal species. Few people reckon with this hypocrisy. Horses versus cows, dogs versus pigs... dolphins versus tuna... Is it zeal to suggest that maybe the central issue behind much of our animal-related problems today stems from our inability to rethink these ethical questions, biases, habits, and traditions? Is it zeal to suggest that we ought to get off our collective mental asses and do some real paradigm shifting? Isn't it about time?
With that said, the article does a pointed job of comparing the mentality of someone like me with people in communities that may well be a long way from thinking it's about time to consider these issues:
South L.A. stands out as the wildest and the grimmest, the MASH unit of dog pounds. Half of the dogs euthanized by Los Angeles Animal Services are killed inside this one building.And how does one get into handling the problem effectively in these areas without being seen as paternalistic, meddling, or otherwise stepping over any lines? I do think the article sells these communities short by generalizing their populations, but there's no denying that there must be some truth to them. Just reading a day in the life of an animal control officer in this part of L.A. is incredibly depressing. It's a miracle we have anyone willing to go out there and do what needs to be done because some citizens can't do the right thing by animals:
[snip]
The community it serves . . . is mostly poor and immigrant and besieged by gangs, an environment in which the struggles of people often trump the needs of pets. These are the unspoken variables of animal control—class and culture—the conditions that fuel L.A.’s kill rate. As urban as South-Central is, much of its population shares an agrarian past, Latinos having come largely from farming societies and African Americans primarily from the South. With that comes a view of animals that tends to be utilitarian and unsentimental. Dogs here are more likely to be kept outside, less likely to be spayed or neutered. If affluent L.A. is inclined to pamper its dogs, inner-city L.A. is inclined to toughen them.
It takes several minutes for [ACO Jose] Gonzalez to realize what is going on, that the woman he is talking to, the one who called for help, is not the one being menaced. She is the source of the problem, a collector of strays—and now that they are causing trouble with her neighbors, she wants them removed. “That’s not how it’s supposed to work,” Gonzalez tells her. The city normally charges $20 to pick up an unwanted pet. He agrees to impound one dog from her property, a brown shepherd mix that may or may not have tried to bite a girl a few houses away. He lassos a couple more in the street, swinging his lariat like a charro on the heels of a calf. Hoisting them onto his truck, he is approached by several neighbors, presumably relieved to see the dogs go. “Can you take our dog, too?” they ask.And that really gets to the heart of it. These dogs are being thrown away. Some have, in fact, been found in the trash, according to numerous articles I've come across over the past year. And, when dogs are not eventually collected or adopted out, they do end up being killed and hauled off, a lot like trash, only our city renders these animals, recycling them back into the food chain in a way I'll save for you to read yourself toward the end of the article.
“Goodness,” Gonzalez mutters. “I feel like the garbage man.”
A percentage of dogs are saved, but there is only a slim hope as ACO Gonzales takes their photo for the internet in hopes of enticing potential adopters, before consigning the poor animals to a cage to wait, but only as long as the city can afford to reserve that space:
Locking the cages behind him, Gonzalez tells himself he is doing the dogs a favor, rescuing them from an uncertain fate. There is always a chance that a nice family could visit, that someone might look one of these pooches in the eye and fall in love. If not, he will never know. “In all honesty, once I put them in, I don’t go back and check,” Gonzalez says. “That would be almost like facing the reality of things.”The reality is that speciesist biases work against certain breeds, while others are more readily adopted out. This bias leads to some animals being euthanized as soon as the 96-hour waiting period has expired, while others get extensions. All this is detailed thoroughly by the author, and I urge you to read it yourself. It's another great case for a moratorium on breeding and selling animals. Katz nails it in describing the treatment of the animals as commodities.
As long as domesticated animals are treated as products for ownership, bought and sold, adopted and returned for a more appealing pet, abandoned like an old plaything, they will continue to live and die at our pleasure, just as long as we don't have to look at it ourselves. Frankly, that is an abysmal way to treat such innocent creatures.
Rights for animals would seem to have a stronger foothold in this world than that of farmed animals, if only because some percentage of our population considers pets to be valuable for more than their ability to delight or defend. But we have a long way to go before even companion animals are treated with the respect they deserve. Hopefully sober-eyed articles like this one will help push things in the right direction, along with a lot help from the city government, administrators like Ed Boks, and unrelenting pressure and public education by activists.
Some day, the way we treat the animals we call our best friends will be appropriate to the companionship and affection they provide. They deserve the best we have to offer, not just because they are feeling creatures, but also because they are our responsibility. If we as a nation can truly treat our animals as they deserve, then we earn the right to consider ourselves as compassionate as we say we are.
Tags: dogs | pets | companion animals | animal services | animal shelters | dog pounds | euthanasia
