The walls are painted mauve and a muted blue. In the middle of the floor stands a stainless steel table where animals are held and comforted as they receive a lethal injection. A nearby shelf holds discarded syringes.
The euthanasia room at the Buncombe County Animal Shelter is a small space whose door is marked “EMPLOYEES ONLY.” Inside, Assistant Shelter Manager Guinn Friedman runs a finger down the pages of a logbook, counting how many animals were put down the day before. “Twenty-eight,” she announces. “Five of those were very young kittens who lost their mother.”
Nearly 8,000 dogs and cats came to the shelter last year. Many were strays, some of them brought by animal-control officers, and many more were “owner surrenders” left by people unwilling or unable to care for them. More than 5,000 of those animals were put to death.
Killing sick and abandoned pets is a grim business that takes an emotional toll on shelter employees. And the fact that the practice is anathema to many local animal lovers makes it harder still.
“We call it ‘compassion burnout,’” says Carolyn Paden, director of public relations for the Asheville Humane Society. Staffers share the onerous duty on a rotating schedule, so no one has to do it two days in a row.
Happily, steps are being taken to curtail the killing. Earlier this year Buncombe County, in partnership with the Asheville Humane Society, the Humane Alliance, The Mimi Paige Foundation, the Animal Compassion Network and the Asheville Kennel Club, announced an initiative called “Countdown to Zero,” which aims to eliminate healthy-animal euthanasia by 2012.
To achieve this, the plan calls for: boosting access to affordable spay/neuter services; raising community awareness about animal welfare; reuniting lost pets with their owners more quickly; increasing the adoption rate for shelter animals; and encouraging owners to keep difficult pets by helping with behavioral and health problems.
Space is at a premium at the county shelter. Animals are held for a minimum of 72 hours before they can be adopted, and many stay for up to a month. At full capacity, the place can barely hold about 250 animals. During a single day last summer, however, 75 animals were brought in. And last week, employees were busy setting up another row of cages to accommodate the springtime boom of cats and dogs.
One room holds dozens of cats—some stretching lazily, others curled up in donated shoeboxes. A dog room has rows of cages holding everything from Chihuahuas to yellow Labradors to St. Bernard mixes to a conspicuous number of pit bulls. Some of the animals are sick: quarantined until they improve or waiting to be put down. Others are here because they bite or roam. Many, however, are healthy, well-adjusted animals awaiting death because there’s not enough room to keep them.
“At this point, we’re still euthanizing healthy animals [due to lack of] space,” says Shelly Moore, executive director of the Asheville Humane Society, which operates the county shelter. “Of course, we don’t want that to be the case.
“It’s a difficult job. The amazing thing is that people are drawn to this work because they love animals. And the sad thing is that out in the community, we’re sometimes seen as the bad guys. We never created the problem. … All of our own pets are spayed and neutered, but nevertheless, we’re the ones who are doing the community’s dirty work, cleaning up their irresponsibility.”
First steps
In December 2003, the Buncombe County commissioners passed a new animal-control ordinance that made spaying and neutering mandatory for all pet dogs and cats, unless their owners bought an “unaltered animals” permit. Before that, as many as 10,000 animals a year had passed through the county shelter. Since 2003, the number of abandoned and seized pets has steadily declined, due in part to low-cost spay-and-neutering services provided by groups like the Humane Alliance and funded by donations from The Mimi Paige Foundation. Between 2005 and 2006, both the number of animals received at the shelter and the number euthanized dropped by roughly 1 percent.
Right now, the front line on the “Countdown to Zero” is Buncombe County Animal Control, a new division of the county Sheriff’s Department that assumed responsibility for animal control last summer. Lt. Helen Hall oversees the division.
“Sheriff Medford asked me if I’d like a challenge, and I said, ‘Yes,’” Hall reports. Her staff of five officers enforces the county ordinance, responding to complaints of cruelty to animals and issuing citations to owners whose pets who have not been spayed or neutered. Behind Hall’s desk is a thick stack of manila envelopes, filled with open cases.
“The big problem confronting the initiative,” says Hall, is space at the county shelter. Financial constraints also loom large.
“We’re working on a PR campaign, but it’s a little hard to do when you don’t have money,” Hall notes.
She cites the success of low-cost spay/neuter programs like “The Big Meow.” The program is a joint venture between Humane Strategies, a national nonprofit based in Oshkosh, Wisc., and the Humane Alliance. The canine equivalent, “The Big Bark,” is partly subsidized by the county.
Still, those programs are heavily dependent on funding—including private contributions. The “Zero” coalition, says Hall, is “constantly looking for people to donate money to these efforts.”
Yet she believes the initiative’s goal is attainable.
“I think it’s very doable,” she says. “We’re all working toward the same goal. Buncombe County is becoming a more humane place all the time.”
Down and dirty
A final key to turning the situation around is the ramshackle facility itself. A former storage building, the dark, cramped structure was never intended to be a shelter. The roof leaks and is at risk of caving in. A cacophony of barking dogs is amplified by the building’s bare, concrete-block walls. What’s more, the place is nearly impossible to find, tucked away on a winding, secondary road in Leicester reached by following vague, cryptic signs.
Friedman believes a new facility planned for Pond Road in Asheville would go a long way toward boosting adoptions and reconnecting lost pets with their owners.
“To get to zero, we have to decrease the amount of animals going in and increase the amount of animals going out,” she says. “People are scared to come to the shelter because of the environment, and because of that, we’re really not getting animals out like we should be.”
Will “Countdown to Zero” work? Many counties across the country have no-kill shelters, suggesting that it’s possible. But Moore of the Humane Society says the campaign’s success will depend as much on individual responsibility as on government or institutional intent.
“It’s really a community solution that’s needed,” she maintains. “It’s not going to be solved by organizations. It’s going to be solved by the community saying, ‘You know what? We want to do the right thing. We want to alter our pets. We won’t let them run loose. We want to make sure they have ID tags and microchips in case they get away from us.’ It’s a culture shift, and that doesn’t happen overnight. We’ve made great strides in the way people view their animals, but we still have a long way to go.”
How you can help
Here are some suggestions from Shelly Moore of the Asheville Humane Society for how community members can help stop the killing of healthy animals:
• Volunteer to temporarily care for an adoptable pet;
• Make sure your pet is spayed or neutered;
• Donate to local spay/neuter programs;
• Adopt a homeless or unwanted animal;
• Don’t allow your pet to run loose;
• If your pet is lost, look for it at the shelter immediately;
• Make sure your pet has an identification tag and/or microchip;
• Contact the Humane Society (236-3885) about helping manage feral cats;
• Volunteer with a local animal organization.
In early April, you wrote an article describing the efforts of several animal welfare groups to eliminate the euthanization of healthy animals in Buncombe County. Toward that end, the Asheville Kennel Club recently donated $5000.00 to the Humane Alliance to subsidize the spaying/netuering of dogs from the WNC area. At $20.00 per, that would cover 250 dogs.
Buncombe County has put in $10,000.00 and I understand that this money is essentially used already.
In addition, our club has provided low/no cost coupons in cooperation with the Humane Alliance for the past several years. These coupons are given to persons that desire to have their dog ‘fixed’ and are unable to afford the cost. Some persons are able to pay a partial amount and others are not. Since 2002, we have provided upwards of $13,000.00 for this.
If this information is worthy of an short article, you may contact me at 683-0802 or 779-3814(cell)
Bob Anderson
Treasurer, Asheville Kennel Club