No-Kill and CAPA have not only impacted our shelters bottom lines, causing nearly every shelter in Delaware to operate in the red, it's also harmful to animals. Thankfully Kent County SPCA is still taking owner relinquished dogs, despite the continuing pressure by No-Kill to not take them in, but cats are another story. Where do residents of Delaware think cats are going when there is no open access shelter to relinquish a cat to when a person has to move due to circumstances such as foreclosure or illness? These owned cats, which are many times declawed and lack defenses are dumped, and left to fend for themselves, getting beat up and injured in the process. There's nothing pretty about it, it's just plain animal cruelty that has been inflicted by our sate legislature and Governor.
I recently had a conversation with someone on Facebook who volunteered at a spay neuter clinic in the region, and the person mentioned that 1 in 5 of their female cats were already coming in pregnant. That doesn't bode well for what kitten season is going to look like here in Delaware, so the cruelty of our situation is just going to get worse.
I can't say it any better than PETA does below. Hopefully the National Governors Association listens to PETA and realizes that CAPA is not the answer, and prevention is the real solution.
'No-Birth' Is the Solution - Turned Away: A Closer Look At 'No-Kill'
The only real, sustainable, and humane way for communities to end the euthanasia of healthy animals at shelters is by cutting off the supply of homeless animals.
PETA has reached out to each of the shelters that turned away animals in the video and urged them to implement a five-point plan that addresses the reasons why animals end up homeless in the first place. The plan includes carefully screening prospective adopters and placement partners to avoid adoptions or transfers into bad homes as well as into hoarding situations, spaying or neutering all animals before their release, offering free and low-cost spay-and-neuter services or assistance, lobbying to ban pet store sales of dogs and cats, and accepting every animal without fees, appointments, or waiting lists.
Additionally, PETA has called on the National Governors Association for three years straight to attack the roots of animal homelessness by promoting mandatory spay-and-neuter legislation across the country.
PETA has been combating animal homelessness hands-on in our own community by sterilizing more than 90,000 cats and dogs over the past 10 years in our mobile clinics and helping thousands of people keep their animals by offering no- to low-cost veterinary services, counseling, and other resources. Our ads and public service announcements have encouraged millions of people to have their animals sterilized and to adopt animals from shelters.
We can turn our communities into places where no cats or dogs have to be euthanized for lack of a home. Each of us can help by always having our animal companions spayed or neutered and never buying animals from breeders or pet stores, supporting and adopting from open-admission shelters, and encouraging our friends and family to do so, too. Together, we can become no-kill the right way—by becoming no-birth.
Even if the State of Delaware doesn't have the compassion and intelligence to make the right choices for our animals, I at least hope Governors of other states where CAPA is introduced continue to see that CAPA is not a financially sustainable solution, is cruel to our animals, and places residents in a horrible situation if they have to relinquish an animal or if they are the unfortunate property owner that cats are eventually dumped onto.
Our state has merely shifted the burden onto residents who in many cases cannot afford to care for these cats dropped onto their properties, or they are faced with watching these cats suffer and starve because of the residents lack of resources. If our shelter system didn't have the resources to handle our pet overpopulation, it's ridiculous that the state would place this burden on our residents at a time when jobs are leaving Delaware left and right. We can only hope our state government starts spending more time doing something constructive like bringing some decent paying jobs to Delaware, rather than spending money to create a department to make CAPA even worse than it already is.
So thanks again to PETA for showing the country what the State of Delaware and so many other communities are faced with as a result of the chaos and political games associated with "No-Kill". Animal shelters that turn animals away because they hold animals indefinitely are not animal shelters, they're merely publicly supported boarding kennels.
