Snowball arrived at Los Angeles Animal Services full-term and was going to be spayed and her puppies killed under City policy. Her puppies were granted a reprieve. Others are not so lucky.
Five years ago, Los Angeles Animal Services General Manager Brenda Barnette appealed to the Los Angeles Board of Animal Services Commissioners “to eliminate the policy that all dogs — including those in late-term pregnancy — must be spayed before they are released.”
‘The spaying of late-term pregnant dogs results in puppies being born by the equivalent of a C-section,’ Barnette wrote. ‘They are able to survive on their own, but these puppies are immediately put to death in our shelters.
Some agencies restrict spaying pregnant dogs to those who have not reached the third trimester. Sterilization of pregnant dogs during the third trimester can create additional surgical risks for the dog.
Barnette asked the commission to prohibit third-trimester spaying if a foster home is available:
The Board of Animal Services Commissioners rejected the request.”
Barnette is back before the Commissioners tomorrow asking them to reconsider. The revived request comes on the heels of the rescue of Snowball, a poodle-mix who arrived at the pound full-term and was going to be spayed and her puppies killed because of the policy. A campaign by rescuers to protect Snowball and her unborn puppies was the impetus Barnette needed to revisit the issue with the commissioners.
Thankfully, Snowball’s puppies were granted a reprieve and are safe. After they are born, weaned, and sterilized, they (and Snowball) will be made available for adoption. But unless the Commissioners approve the policy, others will not be so lucky.
Barnette was right in 2013 and she is right now. Not only does killing healthy, full-term in utero puppies violate the No Kill philosophy, it is a way to cheat on statistics. Because they are not yet born, even when they are viable and full term, even when they are removed from the mother and killed one by one through an overdose of barbiturates, their deaths will not be entered into the statistics. They simply will not count. Instead, their little bodies will be discarded in the trash as if they were nothing more than garbage, even when rescue groups are ready, willing, and able to save them. Moreover, the surgery is riskier. In fact, mothers can and do die as a result of complications from it. For the puppies, it is always deadly. They must be individually killed, usually through an injection of sodium pentobarbital. Even when they are not, when a mother is spayed, the kittens or puppies die from anoxia (oxygen deprivation) due to lack of blood supply from the uterus once the vessels are clamped. They suffocate.
Nonetheless, the Commissioners were unmoved claiming that allowing puppies to be born impacts the adoption of already born dogs and puts the new puppies and mother at risk of getting sick due to the stress of the shelter argument. As to the former, such an argument condones killing and while every rescuer and No Kill advocate supports sterilization and it is a core program of the No Kill Equation model of sheltering championed by the No Kill Advocacy Center, sterilization is a tool to save lives, not end them. Moreover, it is not an either-or proposition: for it is untrue that either unborn puppies must die or those already born must. Both can be placed as the data nationally and communities across the country definitively prove. There are 10 times more homes that become available every year than there are animals dying in shelters. The reason animals in shelters are being killed is because shelters who still kill them have yet to replace killing with humane, viable alternatives that have already transformed shelters across the nation. Killing is a choice, not an inevitability.
Second, killing puppies to reduce the likelihood of disease (in them or the mother) is an inherent contradiction and an obscene inversion of priorities. Not only can the stress and complications of doing a late term spay on the mother in the shelter increase the likelihood of her falling ill, but the argument that having puppies in the shelter is really dangerous for them is only true in those cases where risk is created by the people in the shelter itself. The argument amounts to this: it is dangerous for them because they might get sick and if they get sick, we might kill them. How much sense does it make to kill them to prevent that very thing — death — from happening, or, in other words: we kill them to prevent them from being killed. Moreover, advocates are asking that they be sent to rescue or foster care, not live in the shelter, eliminating that risk.
The fundamental mission of a shelter is to save lives. Everything a shelter does should be a means to protect life and prevent suffering. But too many shelter directors and shelter veterinarians have forgotten this core principle; killing has simply become one more tool in the “medicine cabinet” of these managers. It sits beside the vaccinations, the parvocides, the cleaning solutions, and the antibiotics. But those other things are tools to keep animals alive, to reduce “the likelihood of disease.” One of the primary reasons shelters should vaccinate, clean, disinfect, socialize, foster, and implement all those other programs is so that animals do not get sick to the point where they are killed. Everything they are claiming to try to achieve is a means to the end of not killing. And so while vaccinations, parvocides, and antibiotics help us reach the goal of not killing, killing — by its very act — does not. It is an inherent contradiction to use “killing” as a means to “not killing.” If pounds could kill our way out of this problem, we would have been a No Kill nation many generations ago.
Let’s hope that the Commissioners have the foresight to do the right thing this time around.
————-
Have a comment? Join the discussion by clicking here.