MerlinsRefuge.com
Title
Merlin's Refuge
Description
In the past year, shelters in the Nebraska/western Iowa area took in 25,432 animals. Of that number 11,232 were euthanized (executed) for lack of space, facilities, and loving homes. The shelters that killed these animals serve a valuable purpose: they provide interim homes for lost animals who are reclaimed by their human companions; they place animals in loving adoptive homes; they provide humane care for the animals in their charge. But all these services are short-term, stop-gap measures, and when an animal goes unclaimed and un-adopted for a specified period of time, it is killed to make space for an animal with a better chance for adoption. For all their humane treatment, in the final analysis, conventional shelters are, for thousands of animals, waiting rooms for the executioner.
The vast majority of animals in shelters are domestic animals, the name we give the non-human companions who play with our children, guard our homes, fill our loneliness, and love us without reservation or question. Each of these pets once relied on an affectionate and caring human who, in bringing the animal into a home, established an implicit agreement with the pet to see to its needs, treasure its company, and return its affection. When these non-human friends, who have known only our care and provisioning from puppy- or kitten-hood, become too large, too inconvenient, or just less cute, many humans reject them like outgrown toys or stale pastimes. Some are driven far from home and abandoned to assume feral lives in the wild, an environment for which they have been systematically conditioned by domestication to fail. Some are killed by their trusted and beloved owners. And some are surrendered to animal shelters to enter the adoption lottery, of which the winners are granted survival and the losers are exterminated.
The animals released by owners are the source of an additional problem-feral natives: the offspring of feral pets, born and grown to adulthood without the care of humans, but often living wild lives in human environments. Packs of these native feral animals roam our inner cities or the edges of our towns, exacting bitter survival by preying on other denizens of the filthy alleys and littered streets or foraying into suburban fringes to hunt their more fortunate, cared for cousins, our pets. Disease and accident riddle their bodies with pain, and harsh competition abrades away the loving natures for which they were bred. Unfit for adoption, feral animals who are captured are summarily killed.
