I’m currently reading “Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America” by Nathan J. Winograd.
Though the book focusses mostly on the fate of cats and dogs in United States shelters, it’s inspired a lot of thoughts about the current state of horse rescue in North America.
I’ve just finished the first section of the book, entitled “The controversy of saving live”. This section of the book recounts the birth of the humane movement in America, and discusses how the humane movement got mixed up in animal control (and why that was a huge mistake). More interestingly, it discusses how organisations founded on promoting animal welfare ended up endorsing policies that lead to many healthy animals being killed in shelters.
I am particularly interested in how this happened, because while putting down healthy horses has always been fairly rare, I’ve heard it mentioned as a possibility more and more frequently since the economic downturn.
Blaming the Public
Whenever something goes wrong, people start searching for a reason — something to blame for the problem, and hopefully something to fix. According to animal welfare groups, their shelters were overflowing because of irresponsible pet owners, and it was because of them that they had to come up with a solution for crowding. Irresponsible pet owners don’t sterilize their animals and they allow them to roam. The when faced with the ultimate results of that roaming, litters of new kittens and dogs, they dump them on the shelters. Somewhere along the way, the general public was labelled irresponsible, and the shelters decided that the only way to deal with overcrowding was to put animals down.
In horses the blame is assigned rather differently. Horses aren’t generally left free to wander, and when they are free, it is usually because they broke out. Loose horses are quickly caught by their owners or neighbours in most situations. Occasionally they end up in suburbs or on major traffic routes and there is huge commotion until the horses are caught and carted back to safety.
The horse community needed someone else to blame for the horses without owners, and so “backyard” breeders started being blamed for causing overpopulation by producing too many horses. Backyard doesn’t literally refer to people raising horses in their backyard, of course. Instead it’s a derogatory term created by the horse community to refer to people who breed their horses just because they happen to have a mare and a stallion. The people that breed horses that are not particularly nice examples of the species, and that are not necessarily a good match. It has also come to refer to people who breed because they want to have a foal. Then, when that foal grows up and is no longer cute, they do it again.
Legislation, Education, Sterilization
With blame assigned, it was time to come up with a solution. For the animal shelters, they needed to find some way to fix the public. A three-pronged approach to pet overpopulation was suggested: legislation to force people to control their animals, educate the public on responsible ownership practices, and encourage sterilization to end accidental pregnancies.
Legislation
The animal welfare groups worked hard to get legislation in place that forced people to keep their animals inside or on leashes, or face fines and punishment. In theory, this would stop the roaming. Afraid of the consequences, people would start caring for their pets responsibly, and the problem of roaming would be solved. Of course things never work that way.
All that happened is that responsible pet owners continued to care for their pets responsibly. Irresponsible owners ignored the laws. And when their loose pets were rounded up, they abandoned them in order to avoid paying the fines. Laws don’t make people act responsibly, unfortunately. The new laws meant that animal shelters ended up paying people to enforce the laws, which took money and focus away from the animals.
In most places horses are considered livestock. They are fairly unregulated, especially compared to pets, but there have been attempts lately to change that. The horse community has fought long and hard against proposed laws, designed to register and track every horse. These laws are designed with food animals in mind, and have been proposed as ways to control disease. Many horse people are not comfortable with the idea of horses as food, so laws that treat them like animals destined for consumption face both practical objections and strong emotional objections.
Education
Education is always an admirable way to attack a problem. Education takes aim at the source of the problem, hoping to cut it off and remove the problem in the future. To combat pet overpopulation, animal shelters started sending employees into schools with messages about responsible pet ownership. Whether these are effective or not is hard to know. There doesn’t seem to have been any formal development of these programs, or any study into their impact. Of some concern is that these programs are usually run by the same shelter staff who are being told over and over again that it is the irresponsible public, with whom they are working, that causes all the shelter problems. That may impact their attitude and ability to connect with the people they are trying to educate.
Horse education is not mandated, of course, since there are far fewer people who own horses than cats and dogs. For horse people, education is normally something that people seek out, so of course it is the responsible owners reaping the benefits of available education. Some rescues run events in fairgrounds that better reach the general public, but these are major investments and fairly rare.
Sterilization
Sterilization is a solution that has a big measurable effect. Sterilization means less births, which means less animals coming back to the shelter. Even when pets roam, those pets are no longer copulating and producing more animals. Of course, this assumes that the shelters are adopting out animals that already sterilized. Most do now, but apparently that wasn’t always the case. There was a time where sterilization was strongly encouraged, but not handled by the shelters themselves. Without affordable sterilization options, it didn’t get done.
Gelding is a fairly common operation in the horse world. With the size of horses, an uncontrollable animal can be extremely dangerous. Gelding of males usually done because without all the testosterone, they are a lot easer to handle. WIth the advantages of a safer, easier to handle horse in mind, most people happily spend the money to geld their colts. Most horse rescues also require horses to be gelded before they will let them be adopted. This gelding usually happens on the rescues property (or in foster homes), though it might be paid for by the adopter.
Mares are rarely sterilized though. Spaying a mare has, until fairly recently, been a costly, risky, and invasive procedure. When I started around horses it was spaying was not considered unless there was a medical reason that made it worth the risks to the horse.
It seems there are new methods now that greatly reduce the risk and the cost of the procedure. Mares can now be spayed laparoscopically while standing. This means that no general anesthetic needs to be used, meaning that it is much safer, and the smaller incision means reduced infection risk and faster recovery. I’m not sure how many horse people know about the safer option, but in some places vet’s have started suggesting spaying as viable options for some mares. The downside is that it is still a very expensive procedure.
Cost aside, it seems like there might be a possibility of spaying becoming a viable option for more mares in the future. If more mares are spayed, it will remove the temptation to breed, and hopefully stop people from breeding their mares in the hope that it will improve their personality. The same people that complain about there being too many horses are the ones suddenly considering breeding their mare when they have a career ending injury. Most importantly, if spaying becomes a viable option for mares, rescues can start adopting out only sterilized animals, making sure that the animals they deal with don’t contribute to the problem.
Justifying the Killing
Nobody goes into animal control or rescue with a desire to kill animals. Putting down healthy animals is extremely difficult emotionally, and in order to deal with it, people are constantly justify the killing. They tell themselves that they’re saving these animals from an uncertain fate. That this is a necessary evil, caused by an irresponsible public causing pet overpopulation.
The animal shelters are full, and the only way they can serve new animals is to clear space. Nobody wants the animals (at least that is the theory — in many cases people would take the animals but for having to deal with the shelters, but that’s a thought for another post). Therefore, the only way to clear space is by getting rid of the animals they have. The animals can’t be released (that uncertain future thing), and so they must be killed to make room.
For dogs and cats the uncertain fates imagined are car accidents, disease and starvation. Not pleasant ways to go, and situations that may involve a lot of suffering before death.
The uncertain fate horses usually face is slaughter or starvation. Horses are found starving while in the care of humans far too often, and these cases generally mean a huge influx of horses all at once, putting strain on the already full rescues. People used to use auctions as a last resort to get rid of horses they could no longer afford to keep, but these days auctions are turning away horses that are too skinny to sell, leaving people holding a horse they still can’t afford to feed. People are turning their horses loose on public land and hoping for the best, some are stashing them away in back pastures where they starve to death out of sight, and some people caring for their horses and have been surprised to find extra horses in their pastures — horses that have been dumped by people that can no longer afford them.
Horses aren’t currently slaughtered in the US, due to some law that passed the cost of the required inspectors off on the plants, the but they are slaughtered in Mexico and Canada. This doesn’t mean US horses are safe from slaughter, of course, it just means they travel farther to be slaughtered. And there are fairly few slaughter houses in Canada that handle horses, so even within Canada horses are being shipped long distances to slaughter. The issue of slaughter isn’t one I want to get into here, except to say that it is a very real possibility as an end for horses, and few people are willing to accept slaughter as a possible fate for the animals they love.
The rescues are full, and they are forced to turn away animals. Some rescues are struggling to come up with the money to feed the ones already in their care. Still, whenever a new horse in need comes to the attention of the community, people rally. They do what they can for the horses they hear about. They dig deep, make sacrifices and somehow come up with money and food. But sometimes it feels like there is a never ending stream of horses in need, and people worry about all the ones they can’t help. They worry about the ones they won’t be able to help in the future because of the ones they are helping now. And talk starts to turn to euthanasia.
Right now euthanasia to control horses is a rare, but if people start finding ways to justify it, and it starts happening more often, I’m worried that rescues might caught in a destructive cycle where euthanasia ends up being turned to more often than necessary. Not because they want the horses to die, but because they have had to find a way to personally justify euthanasia in order to deal with desperate times.
No-Kill
In this first section of “Redemption”, Winograd recounts some inspiring tales of successful animal shelters that managed to greatly reduce their death rates. These were shelters that went against recommended and common procedures to save the animals. They engaged the community, instead of blaming it. And they sterilized all animals that went through their doors before that was common practice, and they relied on the public instead of blaming them.
Horse rescue doesn’t have the same difficulties to overcome, having started as rescues instead of animal control organizations. They already make extensive use of the community to foster horses, which is one of the program that played a huge role in reducing killing for the successful shelters featured in the book. Perhaps because the general community is not blamed for the current state of things in the horse community, only the “backyard” breeders take the blame. This makes it easier for people to work with rescues, because they don’t feel like they are being blamed.
Most rescues already geld all the males in their care, though plenty let go of pregnant mares who might end up having colts with no way to ensure they are gelded. Contracts usually specify no breeding, but of course once the horse is out of the rescues hands, they can only only hope they have chosen the adopters well. Mares traditionally aren’t spayed, but until recently that was a question of feasibility. It is definitely something to explore for the future, and responsible rescues probably already have it on their radar.
I’m hoping that the next sections of the book will focus on how no-kill shelters can be achieved on a large scale. Perhaps there will be tips that can be applied to horse rescue, so that it doesn’t fall into the unhappy position of euthanizing healthy animals. If it never becomes a justified option, it is less likely to be turned in the future.
Read Part 2 of Reflections on Redemption
[...] which continued to make me think right to the end. To read reflections on the first section, see Part 1 of Reflections on [...]