When a Houston woman found a skinny kitten covered with fleas, she began calling "no-kill" shelters looking for somewhere to take the animal, not knowing that these types of shelters are usually full and offer no help. Frustrated and worried, she called PETA.

 

We encouraged the caller to bring the kitten indoors right away and set up a temporary home for the animal in the bathroom, where the tabby would be safe and could be given much-needed food and water. The woman agreed. We found a reputable open-admission shelter in the area that would be able to accept the kitten when it opened the next day. The next morning, after just one phone call, the kitten had a welcoming, comfortable place to stay and a chance for a home. Once again, "no-kill" shelters had done nothing to help, while an open-admission shelter had. Open-admission shelters can't place every animal, but they don't turn their backs and leave kittens like this to suffer on the streets or end up giving birth and compounding the homelessness crisis.

So-called "no-kill" shelters sound heroic, but they are often anything but. In reality, they are limited-admission shelters, which turn away the most vulnerable animals and often allow only the youngest, cutest animals admission. And many such places force animals to live for years in a cage, even when the animals are sick or losing their minds from such confinement.

No one wants to have to perform euthanasia, but some of the most caring people in the world have to be brave enough to provide animals with a painless exit from an uncaring world—because no matter what the "no-kill" hucksters and hoarders say, there are too many dogs and cats and too few homes, and leaving them on the streets, selling them to laboratories, or just shunting them along to other states, is not a solution to the animal-homelessness crisis. 

Blame needs to be placed where it belongs—at the hands of breeders, and people who refuse to spay and neuter their animals. In the meantime, open-admission shelters will continue to take in all of society's castoffs, not just the young, healthy, and cute ones—and not just when it's convenient.

If you know anyone who is thinking of buying instead of adopting or who still needs to make that sterilization appointment for a dog or cat, please help us reduce euthanasia by giving them the facts, not by supporting some "no-kill" fantasy facility. 

We've been getting a lot of calls from people asking what we're going to do about some new websites that are being passed around, called KittyBeef.com and PuppyBeef.com, which are purporting to sell prime cuts from kittens and puppies at discount prices. Well, the simple answer is … we're not really going to do all that much about it at all. In fact, I kind of wish we'd thought of the idea ourselves. For anyone who's horrified by the concept of having puppy chops or kitten nuggets for dinner, I hope they'll go just one tiny step further in their outrage and ask themselves how that's any different from chowing down on pork chops or chicken.

At the risk of getting a little rhetorical here, animals killed for our kitchens are just as capable of suffering as the animals we keep in our homes. They're just as smart, just as loving, and the prospect of the horrors that are inflicted on them by the meat industry keeps me up at night and fills me with the same anguish as reports of people who chain their dogs or torture their cats.

If these websites weren't clearly hoaxes, PETA would do something about it—but we wouldn’t make any ethical distinction between addressing that issue and getting KFC to stop abusing chickens—or asking people to go vegetarian. Just for a week, or a day, if you find it hard to get out of the old routine at first. And especially if the idea of having your kitten or puppy bled out and turned into prime cuts gives you the cold sweats. 'Cause it's happening right now to billions of other animals who are just as entitled to kindness, but never experience anything even remotely like it.