By....
Nathan Winograd
I get a lot of questions about animals on a wide variety of topics and I try to answer each and every one.
When they have wider appeal, I’ll post my response.
Recently, someone contacted me saying they read a post that claimed ‘a great deal of the meteoric rise of No Kill since 2000’ is due to the ASPCA (among other organizations). She wanted to know if I agreed.
To answer her, I sat down and cataloged the ASPCA’s misdeeds since 2000:
Ed Sayres, the president of the A.S.P.C.A. for almost a decade, was succeeded this spring by Matthew E. Bershadker.Getty Images
- Introduced legislation to allow New York state pounds to kill animals within seconds of arriving, with no holding period of any kind, if two shelter workers, such as kennel attendants or janitors, say the animal is “psychologically suffering.”
- Introduced legislation in New York State to allow feral cats to be immediately killed on intake.
- Denigrated and attacked the No Kill movement by teaching shelters how to fight back and continue killing, calling No Kill an “extremist agenda.”
- Knowingly and falsely claimed that “open admission” animal control facilities cannot be No Kill: “a no-kill shelter really can’t have an open admission policy. it must limit its intake if it wants to adopt out animals and not kill them.”
- Actively fought No Kill in Austin, TX, defending a director that killed 100,000 animals (over 12,000 each year, 1,000 each month, 34 each day, 1 every 12 minutes the shelter has been open to the public). Said the ASPCA CEO: “I think [Town Lake Animal Center Director] Dorinda Pulliam is a very effective leader.”
- Claimed in USA Today, one of the most widely read newspapers in America, that “there is no room for No Kill as morally superior,” equating killing homeless animals as the moral and ethical equivalent of saving their lives.
- Tried to undo California’s law making it illegal for shelters to kill animals when rescue groups are willing to save them, a law that saves roughly 50,000 animals a year from death.
- Fought legislation in California to save more animals, saying shelter directors should not be second guessed.
- Embraced an accord that classified feral cats as “untreatable” or “unhealthy,” sharing the same category as hopelessly ill or irremediably suffering pets, and the same fate: death.
- Embraced a vision for the future of animal sheltering that said shelters that do not kill cannot use the term “No Kill” and those shelters that do kill cannot be criticized for any of the following practices: “temperament testing” dogs to death , banning breeds, killing underaged kittens and puppies rather than fostering before adoption, killing animals who rescue groups wanted to save.
- Refused to respond to animal cruelty calls, allowing dogs to starve all over New York City where it is located.
Nathan Winograd - images that will haunt you foreverA puppy as he enters Memphis Animal Services. The same puppy near death from starvation after weeks in the shelter’s custody. They refused to feed him.
- Killed Max, a traumatized dog, despite an offer by a rescue group to save her.
- Rather than save them, transferred healthy kittens to a pound which neglects, abuses, and then kills them because the ASPCA did not want to spend the $30 it would have cost to save each of them.
- Allowed a cat with a broken leg to sit at their facility without any medical care for 2.5 weeks and then set the cat to an abusive pound to be killed.
- Fundraised off of animals they claimed to “rescue,” then shipped those animals to kill shelters.
- Sent underweight dogs to an abusive pound to be killed. They were.
- According to NYC’s Shelter Reform Action Committee, “The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals claims it is the voice for defenseless animals: ‘We Are Their Voice…’ But as long as the ASPCA allows cruelty and neglect to continue in New York City’s Animal Care & Control (ACC), the ASPCA has no standing to speak for any animal most specifically defenseless ACC animals. And it’s not as though the ASPCA is unaware of what’s going on at the ACC.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If that is true, the pictures below speak volumes.
"A dead dog, atop a pile of dead animals, is teeming with maggots and blood at the Associated Humane Societies in Newark, NJ in 2009. The white specks on the floor are maggots in a pool of blood. The shelter takes in $8,000,000 a year but has a long, sordid history of animal neglect."
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If that is true, the pictures below speak volumes.
"A dead dog, atop a pile of dead animals, is teeming with maggots and blood at the Associated Humane Societies in Newark, NJ in 2009. The white specks on the floor are maggots in a pool of blood. The shelter takes in $8,000,000 a year but has a long, sordid history of animal neglect."
The ASPCA is located just 18 blocks away from the ACC’s Manhattan shelter, and ASPCA employees are frequently in and out of the ACC shelters.”
- Named the Houston SPCA the best shelter in America, even though that shelter’s regressive policies, breed discrimination, antagonistic relationship with rescue groups, lack of transparency and failure to comprehensively implement alternatives to killing make it the antithesis of a well-run, compassionate and successful animal shelter. The Houston SPCA killed seven out of 10 animals that year.
- Gave a $50,000 grant to a chicken “processing” company that slices the throats of chickens.
- Sent staff door to door in a communities where it was not located with a dog wearing an adoption vest pretending it was the local shelter to raise money. Employees were instructed to lie to people.
- Covered up animal abuse by its own staff that led to injury and death at its animal hospital.
When she arrived.....
Shortly thereafter.....
She was dead......
When she arrived.....
Shortly thereafter.....
She was dead......
A 10-month old dog enters Los Angeles County’s animal shelter healthy, and slowly begins to die of pneumonia and starvation. She was subsequently found dead after a period of several weeks. Staff claimed no one noticed that she was not eating.
- Returned neglected dogs to abusers because it did not want to spend the money on housing them.
- Enacted a program in a FL pound to send dogs from one kill shelter to another kill shelter to raise the live release rate deceptively.
- In forestalling work to save more dogs in shelters, falsely claimed “50 percent of all children will be bitten by a dog before their 12th birthday.”
- Claimed the Philadelphia pound should not be criticized for its 12% live release rate saying it was within the “norms” of U.S. shelter facilities.
- Demanded that Philadelphia’s animal control rescind its support for No Kill or it would lose ASPCA funding.
- Under the ASPCA’s Mission: Orange program in Austin, the death rate went up after they claimed only 33% of animals were adoptable: “the problem is not getting adopters to the shelter, but rather, having enough desirable and placeable animals to choose from.”
- Featured on its website a three-time felon who sold meth and fought No Kill in Austin as an example of a good animal advocate for his work trying to rid the streets of stray dogs and cats, even if it meant killing at the pound.
And then there is Oreo and Oreo’s Law.
Oreo was a one-year-old dog who was thrown off the roof of a six-floor Brooklyn apartment building in 2009.
She suffered two broken legs and a fractured rib. Several of the neighbors in the building reported having heard the sound of her being beaten.
The ASPCA nursed her back to health and arrested the perpetrator. They also dubbed her the “miracle dog” and fundraised off her plight, reportedly raising millions. But the miracle was short lived.
According to the ASPCA, when Oreo recovered from her injuries, she started to show signs of aggression. After the money was counted and safely deposited into ASPCA bank accounts, the ASPCA made the decision to kill her.
If it was true that Oreo was still traumatized and untrusting, who could blame her? She needed time. Although the ASPCA could have cared for Oreo as long as it took to get her to trust again, they refused. But others came forward to offer what the ASPCA would not: time and space to learn that not all humans are abusers.
A No Kill sanctuary near the ASPCA which specializes in rehabilitating aggressive dogs (and, if that proves impossible, safely caring for them for the rest of their lives), contacted the ASPCA to ask if they could assume responsibility for Oreo. They made numerous telephone calls and sent numerous emails.
They were ignored, hung-up on and lied to. Two volunteers of the group even went to the ASPCA but were escorted out after the ASPCA refused to meet with them.
On a cold, Friday morning on November 13, 2009, Oreo was killed; not by her abuser, but by those whose mission it was to protect her. The kennel that the sanctuary readied in anticipation of her arrival lay empty and unused that day, filled with a soft bed, a pool of water and several toys for her to play with.
Instead, Oreo’s body was discarded in a landfill.
Instead, Oreo’s body was discarded in a landfill.
After Oreo was killed, “Oreo’s Law” was introduced in New York which would have made it illegal for shelters, including the ASPCA, to kill animals who rescue groups were willing to save. It was estimated that if the law passed, roughly 25,000 animals a year would be saved.
The ASPCA made it its mission to ensure that they would not be and succeeded in killing the law every year it was introduced. Thanks to them, instead of being sent to rescue, an estimated 200,000 animals have been killed since and another 25,000 continue to be killed yearly.
Instead of enjoying the second chances and loving new homes rescue groups would have guaranteed them, they are dead — or soon will be — their bodies left to rot in New York State landfills.
Tragically, this is only a partial list.
Did ‘a great deal of the meteoric rise of No Kill since 2000’ happen because of the ASPCA? It happened in spite of them.
Having said that, I am the first to admit, and wholeheartedly celebrate, that the animal welfare landscape today is very different than it was when I first became involved in my work promoting the No Kill model, when virtually every large national group opposed TNR, foster care, shelter volunteers, offsite adoptions, and every other life-saving innovation of the No Kill Equation.
This outcome is, in fact, the very thing I set out to accomplish when I dedicated my career to the No Kill movement more than two decades ago.
But with millions of animals still dying in our nation’s shelters, and the pressing need for continued innovation to protect the lives of animals still at risk (such as traumatized dogs with behavior problems, wildlife, and more), failure to recognize how it was that we got this far — a collective amnesia about the battles against powerful, entrenched interests within the animal protection movement itself that we had to wage to build the road that led us to where we are today — threatens to revisit upon this movement the same deadly stagnation and dangerous complacency with the status quo that was to blame for over a century of unquestioned, uninterrupted killing. It threatens to put our movement back to sleep.
To learn why the ASPCA behaves this way, click here: nathanwinograd.com/no-kill-in-spite-of-the-aspca/
Photo: The bereaved owner, 58-year-old Rafael Lopez
Images That Will Haunt You Forever – Nathan J Winograd
In 2007, when Bullet, this man’s dog, fell ill, he took him to the ASPCA’s animal hospital in Manhattan for care. He had fed Bullet with a spoon since birth. “He was my baby,” Lopez told
Instead of treating him, an abusive ASPCA employee kicked Bullet to death. The ASPCA subsequently covered it up and lied to him. “I brought the dog there thinking they would save my dog,” he said. “I killed him by taking him there.”
He buried Bullet in a white towel beneath a tree.
The president of the A.S.P.C.A. Matthew E. Bershadker.
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Oreo and 60,858 Others – Nathan J Winograd
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