Animal Rights or Human Responsibility (AR-HR)

In watching the H1N1 influenza coverage and in reading a beautifully written letter by Lori Redmon, President and CEO of the Kentucky Humane Society, I’ve been thinking about the statistics that are thrown at us to sway our opinions on topics everyday.  I was immediately struck by the damage that bad statistics can wreck on the policies and perspectives of even the well-informed.  There is wonderful perspective in the letter on the use of buzzwords in the animal sheltering industry, words like euthanasia, no-kill, open intake & selective intake.  These are words often misunderstood by the public and the insider’s perspective on these terms is good to see.  Unfortunately, the perspective is lost when it comes to overpopulation due to bad statistics.

In this letter, the Spay USA statistic is quoted “…one un-spayed female dog and her offspring can reproduce 67,000 puppies in six years.”  This statistic depends on one thing, that the public will never look how those numbers were obtained.

To obtain this statistic from one dog in 6 years, the original dog must produce 6+ pups/year with every pup also producing 6+ pups/year.  Biologically, this isn’t possible due to a little thing called puberty.  Include the statistic that 75% of pets are neutered, it becomes mathematically impossible.  In fact, when the HSUS statistic of  a 75% pet neutering rate applied to the calculation, those 67,000 puppies become 56 puppies, in 6 years.  That is actually a frighteningly low number of pups.  The problem is, this biologically impossible statistic has become ‘common knowledge’ pushed by animal rights groups,  believed by a large portion of the animal welfare advocates and has filtered down to the rest of the population. 

Although it sounds like heresy, we don’t have an overall pet overpopulation problem.  We have a combination of problems with 2 of the most significant below: 

• Over-population in some regions but shortages in others.  There are shelters and rescues bringing in pets from out of city, out of state and even out of country to provide the pets people are looking for.  What we have here is a resource allocation problem
• Inexperienced pet owners with no idea how to train animals, and an inability to easily obtain a trained animal to fit their experience level.  It used to be acceptable to sell trained dogs, they even commanded a premium, yet it is demonized now.  So, inexperienced owners get pups they don’t have the tools to train, then turn them over to a shelter in frustration during the pup’s adolescence.  These untrained adolescent dogs often then get adopted by a new set of inexperienced pet owners who are equally overwhelmed by the challenges of animal training.  This problem alone is a massive contributor to shelter turn-ins and a very possible reason that previously adopted dogs make up the largest portion of shelter relinquishment.

This means that the dream of a home for all adoptable pets is challenging but realistic. It also means understanding that the concept of  ‘no-kill’ does not apply to every animal, but to the reasonably sound of mind and body.  Death is not the worst option an animal can face, but it certainly shouldn’t be the first option.  In cases of over-crowding and in the electronic age, it should not present an excessive challenge to establish where a rescue or shelter has space to assist. 

Unfortunately, bad statistics are even worse than no statistics.  They point us in the wrong direction, they send us chasing after the wrong questions and the wrong answers.  They justify actions that we would discard as unthinkable in the face of  accurate information, like killing adoptable animals.  Statistics like the Spay USA statistic don’t just drive bad policy, they kill.

Copyright 2009 by Erica Saunders   http://AR-HR.com
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