State Sen. Bill Stanley, R-20th District, recently announced plans to sponsor legislation to hold private animal shelters accountable for their high euthanization rates.
State Sen. Bill Stanley, R-20th District, recently announced plans to sponsor legislation to hold private animal shelters accountable for their high euthanization rates.
According to Stanley, many of the private animal shelters in the state have very high save rates, meaning the majority of animals go to new homes rather than being euthanized. However, according to Stanley, other organizations, like the PETA shelter in Norfolk, Va., had “an extraordinarily high kill rate”, noting the shelter euthanized about 80 percent of their animals last year.
“Euthanasia should be out of necessity, not convenience,” Stanley said. “We’re doing everything we can to reduce those kill rates throughout the commonwealth of Virginia.”
While private organizations have previously been made to report statistics about their intakes and number of animals euthanized, the forthcoming legislation introduced by Stanley will require private animal shelters to provide more detailed information about the condition and efforts made to find a home for animals prior to euthanization.
Tabitha Treloar, the director for communications for the Richmond SPCA, a private animal shelter with a “no kill policy,” said that while her organization will euthanize to “provide relief to an animal who is suffering an untreatable sickness or injury and is incapable of recovery…we don’t think you can ethically apply the word when you’re taking the life of an animal who is healthy, or who could, with veterinary care, recover from a condition.”
She also said that her organization “carries that definition to those animals who are so behaviorally dangerous to people or other animals, that they can’t be helped.”
Treloar noted that of the approximately 3,600 animals that the Richmond SPCA took in last year, less than one percent were euthanized, and as a result, her organization has no qualms with the proposed bill.
She did say, however, that the bill could incidentally “present a material burden” on some of the smaller private organizations across the state, by forcing them to reallocate funds and resources away from their “core focus” as shelters.
When asked about the forthcoming legislation, a media representative from PETA said in order to address the issue of euthanasia, Virginia must “attack the root cause…by seriously funding aggressive high volume spay and neuter programs as PETA [has].”
According to the PETA representative, the organization’s mobile clinics sterilized more than 11,000 dogs and cats this year. In turn, he said, these actions will prevent homeless and unwanted animals from entering the state’s shelters in the first place.
When asked about the organization’s policy on euthanasia, the representative declined to comment, but referred to the following video.
In the video, Daphna Nachminovitch, senior vice president of “cruelty investigations,” said that of the 3,031 animals who came to PETA in 2014, 2,454 were “sick, suffering, dying, aggressive, and otherwise unadoptable animals” and were therefore euthanized.
She also made the comment that many of these animals were sent to the PETA shelter by “no kill shelters” in an effort to “keep their statistics appealing while…criticizing PETA for taking in the animals no one else would euthanize.”
The video also states that “more than 500” of the animals euthanized came from destitute owners who cared for the animals, but couldn’t afford to pay to euthanize when their pets were sick, old and injured.
Stanley also acknowledged the effect poverty has on community animal shelters’ euthanization rates. As a result, he will also be sponsoring legislation this upcoming session, due in the next week, which will “create vouchers for those people in low income, underserved areas who can’t afford to get their animals spayed or neutered.”
He concluded that such a measure will “reduce the number of animals we have in public pounds, reduce the kill rates and take the burden off of [animal shelters] while saving a lot of money for the state in the long run…”
On the previously filed legislation about keeping better records on euthanasia he said, “I think all of us have an obligation…accountability is critical so we can see how our animal shelters are doing and where we can put resources to help them find ‘forever homes’ for animals and reduce the kill rate.”
