When Wayne Pacelle’s team perjured themselves in a Wilkes County, North Carolina courthouse, effectively condemning over 100 dogs, including puppies born in a shelter, to death, the condemnation among the grassroots across the country was swift and strong. But Julie Castle, the “expert” at Best Friends, told us all to shut up. She told us that we’ve said enough, that it was time to hit what she called “the reset button,” and that they were the experts and would take care of everything. Of course, they didn’t.
When Ed Sayres killed Oreo despite a rescue group ready, willing and able to save her, and when the ASPCA effectively condemned an additional 25,000 animals every year who have an immediate place to go to certain death by fighting Oreo’s Law (a law that would have made it illegal for shelters to kill animals when rescue groups were willing to save them), Francis Battista of Best Friends contacted supporters of the bill asking them to withdraw their support in deference to the ASPCA. He told them that Best Friends would never support a law if it was opposed by the ASPCA and neither should they. He also stated shelter directors should not be second guessed in their decisions to kill animals because they have an expertise others do not.
When Wayne Pacelle’s team claimed to have “rescued” dogs from what HSUS said was a “hoarder” only to send them to regressive shelters where they were killed in one of the most brutal ways possible, by gassing, and furor among the grassroots erupted, HSUS itself told us to settle down, assuring us that they hand-picked the shelters themselves and that their expertise showed these shelters went “above and beyond” the call of duty.
When the grassroots condemned Wayne Pacelle and HSUS after it was discovered that Michael Vick, the most notorious dog abuser of our generation, acquired a dog and that Pacelle himself “urged” him to adopt a shelter dog and told the press he would “dog a good job as a pet owner,” some “Pit Bull” advocates lashed out, effectively telling the grassroots that we have no right to criticize, that they—not we—know best because they handled some of the Vick dogs and we didn’t.
This is a recurring pattern within the animal protection movement. Over and over again, self-proclaimed “leaders” dismiss and reprimand the grassroots for questioning their actions, condemn those who do so as “divisive” and then assert their superiority by arguing that they have a knowledge and expertise that the average animal lover does not possess and that because of that “expertise,” the grassroots should defer to them, especially when it involves the “necessity” of killing.
Why do they do this? And where did this troubling viewpoint come from?
Defending killing equals power in the animal “protection” movement
At the turn of the last century, many animal protection organizations took over the job of animal control, agreeing to start killing the very animals they had been formed to protect. As a result, animal lovers fled from those organizations. Over time and as a result, the grassroots of the animal protection movement lost touch not only with what was really going on in our nation’s shelters, how poorly they were operating and how the killing occurring there was a choice rather than a necessity, they also came to defer to the people running them as “experts” with a knowledge and expertise beyond the grasp of the average person.* Our movement bought into a whole series or rationalizations and excuses to justify the killing simply because we did not know any better.
This point of view has created a hierarchical structure based on deference, unwavering allegiance, and unquestioning obedience to those who run these organizations and the large animal protection groups. Intolerant of dissent, the leaders of these organizations have historically maintained this preferential treatment by arguing that the ultimate crime in animal welfare is not the needless killing of animals or the philosophies and rationalizations built up over the decades to justify it, but rather, questioning those rationalizations and those who promote them. Until very recently, the cardinal rule in the animal protection world has been to promote “movement unity” rather than the very goals for which the movement was founded: the protection of animals.
It is not the questioning of the leadership of the animal protection movement that harms and kills animals, it is the failure to do so that does
For decades, the self-professed “leaders” of the movement have perpetuated the fiction that all is well in our nation’s shelters. They have assured us that they are overseeing these organizations, providing guidance and assistance to make sure they are run humanely and effectively: through their shelter assessments, their national conferences and their publications for sheltering professionals. In reality, they have failed to create substantive standards by which to measure success and hold directors accountable, and remained deafeningly silent regarding the cases of abuse proliferating at shelters nationwide. In short, they have failed us. We trusted them, content to write them checks to do the job while we look the other way because the “experts” were in charge, and in so doing, have allowed our shelters to remain virtually unsupervised and unregulated for decades, with devastating results.
Today, the biggest roadblock standing in the way of a No Kill nation is the animal protection movement itself. It is a broken, dysfunctional movement, plagued with a festering malignancy that we are not allowed to criticize those in positions of leadership, a philosophy which undermines the very cause it claims to be defending. In reality, movements for social justice are not about organizations or the individuals who work at them. They are, first and foremost, about ideals. Authentic and effective advocates are duty-bound to recognize that it is not who is right, but what is right that matters and orient their advocacy accordingly, regardless of what label an organization may claim: SPCA, humane society, shelter or animal rights group. Indeed, standing up to those who claim to be “friends”—the very shelters and animal protection organizations that kill, defend the killing and are working to thwart the reform that would end it—is the only way the No Kill movement can ever hope to fully succeed, and the only way the animal protection movement as a whole can ever reach its fullest potential, as the history of the No Kill movement thus far already demonstrates.
If we are to prevail, if we are to end the killing, that means fighting these groups out of dire and tragic necessity. As much as some people would like to believe otherwise, the No Kill movement and the animal protection movement as it now exists are not the same movement. We are, in fact, two distinct ones: one championing life; and the other, death. In short, we in the No Kill movement have no choice but to fight the animal protection movement because they fight us in our effort to reform our nation’s shelters.
If we did not fight, there would be no No Kill movement, no TNR, no foster care, no shelters working with rescue groups because all of these things were done over the opposition of the large national groups which denigrated those programs and vilified those who championed them. Well into the 1990s, it was still the official policy of HSUS that shelters should not work rescue groups rather than kill animals. And when California rescue groups were tired of being turned away and watching shelters kill the very animals they offered to save, they succeeded in seeking legislation to make it illegal for shelters to kill animals when they were willing to save them. HSUS fought it. Should we have deferred to them? If we hadn’t fought them, over 40,000 animals saved every year because shelters now have to work with rescue groups would still be being killed. Rather than 12,000 animals a year being transferred as was true before the law, there are now well over 50,000 animals being saved—animals HSUS wanted to see dead. Unfortunately, they successfully fought a similar law in Texas in 2011 and Florida this year.
If people like Castle, Battista, and others want to defend groups like the HSUS or the ASPCA and all the horrible things they have done to harm animals, there is nothing we can do to stop them from doing so. We can, however, render their point of view utterly irrelevant by continuing to build a movement that rejects it and which puts animals, and not the careers and reputations of people who sell them out, first. And, in so doing, we can send them this powerful message: evolve or get the hell out of the way, because you cannot be a leader in a movement that has moved beyond you.
* In truth, there is no special knowledge or expertise that makes the killing of dogs and cats or other animals acceptable.
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