The frenzied beeping of anesthesia monitoring equipment echoes as I dodge Coco, one of the resident shelter cats with a penchant for ankles, and tiptoe down a freshly mopped hallway with a bleachy smell that makes my eyes water.
A man in worn flannel and workboots waits at the front counter, face drawn; his elderly catahoula dog is waiting in the back seat of his car for an 11am euthanasia appointment. Somewhere in the clinic, a newly spayed dog is howling as she wakes.
“Covelo has at least two roaming dog packs,” she says after hanging up, “running through people’s yards and killing pets. It’s only a matter of time before it’s a child.”
Last year, rescuers found a pair of Covelo litters under a decaying trailer. Two of the puppies were dead, rotting under piles of their living siblings. This was not the first time.
Coco, for example, came from Point Arena, a city an hour to the south of us, towards the far end of our service area. She was brought in with “a string hanging out of her rectum” which proved to be her intestines. Vet staff initially thought they might need to euthanize her due to the complexity of her case and the resources available, but she proved so sweet that they took a chance, tacking her intestines in place.
Last year, we took in 694 animals, from animal cruelty cases to unwanted litters, and we are drowning. We hear that animal care and control is telling people to leave found animals where they are because they don’t have the capacity to handle them. Those people turn to us or Inland Valley Humane Society, a foster-based rescue that is similarly inundated. As closed admission shelters, we can decide to turn animals away if we lack space, even though we strive to prevent it, knowing what may happen to those we do not accept.
The list of people waiting to surrender animals is always growing.
It is workers such as Sierra and Michael who make our services possible. They’re the unseen, unheralded heroes of animal sheltering across the country, a workforce on the frontlines of a pet overpopulation crisis that has been steadily building over the last four years.
Getting people to understand that crisis sometimes feels impossible. Most members of the public are only interested in one thing: euthanasia.
In 2023, 690,000 dogs and cats were euthanized in shelters across the US. For many members of the public, this calls to mind healthy, adoptable animals euthanized for space in open admission (so-called “kill”) shelters – those required to accept all animals, even if there’s no room. But shelters also have to cope with owner-requested euthanasias, behavioral problems and animals who are so sick or injured that a gentle death is the most positive outcome.
The issue we and many other shelters are facing is this: after a record low of 5.5 million in 2020, animal intakes are slowly increasing, and they aren’t leaving – in 2023, 6.5 million animals entered, and only a little over 6 million left. Animals are lingering for weeks, months and sometimes years in the shelter. Between 2022 and 2023, the number of animals waiting to get out of shelters increased by 177,000.
For us, these numbers have faces, such as Sophie (intake 8/11/22), Asia (4/14/23), and Annie (4/21/23). We’re also being hit by the tight job market, which makes it hard to hire and retain personnel, creating even more strain for staff: more animals, fewer people. (...)
Shelter workers are at the frontlines of this crisis, providing daily care to cats and dogs in environments ranging from capacious, well-funded private rescues to crowded municipal shelters where dogs bark frenziedly through rusting fences and cats coil, terrified, in small metal cages.
They aren’t doing this work for the money. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, kennel attendants and animal care workers earn a median wage of $29,790, often with limited benefits. (...)
But logistical issues such as trying to make their paychecks match living expenses is only part of what deeply affects shelter workers. The same stories that go viral on social media for being sad are also sad for the workers caring for those animals, many of whom grow deeply attached to their charges and experience empathy for even the briefest lives. A kitten so beloved by the staff that they carried him around in a sling is buried under a plum tree outside the shelter.
Those lives do not blur together. We remember all of them.
Our surrender waiting list is bulging at the seams; after a man threatened to “throw them against the wall”, we hastily made room for Kiwi, Raspberry and Strawberry, three clearly feral kittens who huddle, traumatized and hissing, in the back of their intake kennel, exploding like popcorn if you open the door. The staff member who handled the intake was shaken, her hands trembling as she recounted the story.
Animal care workers like her are confronting a form of moral injury, in which they may struggle with being asked to do things that go against their consciences, or circumstances expose them to feelings of helplessness or betrayal. In open admission shelters, some are coping with the caring-killing paradox, described in 2005 in a study exploring the heavy impact of euthanasia on shelter workers, who may play with a dog in the morning and euthanize it in the afternoon. Both phenomena are associated with issues such as anxiety, suicidal ideation and substance use disorder as people struggle to process traumatic events.
The public, however, doesn’t see Sierra’s face falling as one of our permanent shelter cats, Oscar, gets sicker and sicker until the sad Friday afternoon when we have to euthanize him. Nor do they see Michael speaking animatedly on behalf of a dog with behavior issues.
“I hear about stories where shelter staff or managers get death threats because they’re euthanizing animals,” says Dr Kathleen Cooney, director of education at the Companion Animal Euthanasia Training Academy. She’s speaking to negative public attitudes about shelter workers, sometimes stereotyped as callous for the hard, dirty parts of their jobs.
Meanwhile, they experience the incredible emotional strain of “seeing the worst of the worst, the worst side of humans, having to see pets suffering”, says Jerrica Owen, executive director of the National Animal Care and Control Association (Naca), which is working to develop consistent professional standards and training in the field.
“Animal control officers are first responders,” Owen says, but ACOs don’t have the hero status of firefighters and paramedics. Instead, they’re treated like glorified janitors, ignoring the catastrophic mental health issues in the field, with animal care workers more likely to die by suicide than the general population, and experiencing high rates of burnout and so-called “compassion fatigue” because of the secondary and primary trauma they face in their work.
by SE Smith, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Cassandra Young Photography/Courtesy Mendocino Coast Humane Society
