A community cat. Groups like VACA fight efforts to save them through TNR and promote efforts that empower animal control officers to round them up and kill them. Thankfully, legislators are listening less and less.
Why do some commonsense legislative efforts to protect animals in shelters fail? Because the groups that legislators often turn to for guidance—the shelters themselves and their state associations—betray the animals in order to defend the status quo. Thankfully, that is changing.
The Virginia Animal Control Association (VACA), for example, opposed and fought against a bill that required private shelters in Virginia to try and find homes for animals, rather than just kill them out of convenience. They called the requirement that shelters try adopting out animals before killing them “government overreach.” Thankfully, the legislature did not agree and overwhelming approved the bill (95 to 2 in the House and 35 to 1 in the Senate), which the governor signed. At the same time, VACA supported a bill which would have empowered animal control officers to round up community cats on private property and then kill them. Thankfully, the legislature did not agree and defeated the bill. VACA also fought efforts to mandate more transparency in shelters, saying that it would lead to high “paper costs” regardless of whether it would protect animals and their families. They fought efforts to protect community cats by allowing TNR in lieu of round up and kill. They took no position on legislation which would have created an animal cruelty conviction database that would have allowed rescuers and others to know if someone trying to adopt animals had been convicted of cruelty. Like in other states, the legislative and regulatory efforts to protect animals in Virginia from animal cruelty, convenience killing, trap and kill, and by mandating transparency and accountability found shelters and their lobbying group on the wrong side of almost every issue.
Ironically, VACA goes on to chastise shelter reformers for having the audacity—as citizens in a democracy, as taxpayers who fund their salaries, and as animal lovers whose values these agencies are supposed to represent—to “second guess” and try to “undermine” their decisions to kill. Introducing legislation, filing petitions for rulemaking with regulatory agencies, and participating in the democratic process is called “bullying” and “troubling.” What’s next, they ask, “Threats to [shelter workers] and their families?… Not as far-fetched as one might imagine.”
Actually, it is far-fetched and a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. They are the ones who commit violence towards animals by injecting them with lethal drugs. We’re trying to stop the violence through the same peaceful, democratic means embraced by every other movement for social improvement in history: legislation. To equate engagement in the legislative process as one step removed from the inciting of violence and to malign people who do so as “extremists” serves only to reveal how desperate they have become. When you can’t argue with the message, shoot the messenger. And when the messenger is merely calling for an end to systematic violence against animals and the implementation of humane, life affirming alternatives most citizens would be stunned to learn are not already standard operating procedure at our nation’s animal shelters, fear mongering about the nature of that agenda serves only to further reveal their own extremism, thereby eroding their credibility and with it, their influence among our elected representatives.
Their desperation is evidence of our progress.
To learn why groups like VACA are no friend to animals in shelters and no friend to animal lovers, click here.
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