Rover And Tabby Deserve Better Than A Laboratory Demise

I am appalled by what is happening in animal shelters around here lately.

Even in a time of stretched and scant money, it is hard to imagine a more dismal failure of public policy than a “humane” society selling doomed animals to a veterinary school for students’ practice. What a sick and twisted idea!

How much donor money would vanish from an animal “shelter” that sells its strays for such use? I know my dollars would.

Both Spokane County and Kootenai County humane societies should give a polite and firm no to Washington State University’s ongoing proposal to buy abandoned dogs at $30 a living body.

Major medical experts insist, perhaps rightly, that even in these days of computer images and virtual reality, real animals are required for training, experiment and research. They argue that healthier pets, as well as healthier humans, result from most of this research.

The researchers, some of them in prestigious institutions with worldwide reputations, maintain their work would be enfeebled without experiments on animals in the lab.

Granting this premise for the sake of argument, there is yet a chasm of difference between breeding animals specifically for use in research and teaching and selling old, infirm or abandoned pets to be anesthetized and cut open prior to death.

Most animals in shelters were pets once. They may have been abused, mistreated, malnourished or neglected, or had owners who could no longer afford them. But they had homes, human contact and loyalty to the two-legged species that housed them.

To take doomed strays and interrupt their journey to a dignified death by selling them to medical schools to be poked, prodded and cut open is a grotesque perversion of what an animal shelter is supposed to be.

And, bad as the idea is at first glance, it can only get worse. If we begin with strays, can it be long before the policy extends to pets brought in by poor people who cannot afford to have them eliminated by a veterinarian? If you brought in a dying pet, would you be comfortable knowing he or she was going to be moved out the back door to a waiting student?

The entire notion mocks the beautiful bond between pet and human to such an extent that, cynical as I am, I still find it hard to believe that WSU suggested it, that Spokane County’s animal shelter accepted it or that Kootenai County’s animal shelter is considering it. A veterinary school that resorts to this sort of policy needs a better way to fund its programs.

A couple of years ago, this situation would have had me howling for an investigation, as well as for the firing of administrators, if not for their heads on poles.

Now I realize that cash, or the lack of it, can cause otherwise intelligent and gifted people to embrace nonsense. Too often in our culture, morality and ethics are driven by money. A fully funded animal shelter would reject this monstrous barbarism out of hand for the fiendish cruelty it is. An animal shelter selling its pets for research and training is an idea that could only come about in an era of monetary trouble.

The prosperity we are all supposed to be sharing is an illusion. There is little money available for social investment, for job training, libraries, schools, roads, health care and the general public good. Is it any surprise that selling off animals to what could easily be described as bewildering torture, even with anesthesia, is an idea that to some shortsighted individuals seems a decent compromise?

The overpopulation in pets is a serious problem and one that must be dealt with intelligently and responsibly by all pet owners. So is the money crunch that apparently is affecting animal shelters.

If we love our animals and want decent, humane care for them, we must support our local shelters, preferably with regular cash donations, so they never again have to consider horrible torture for the sake of economics.

Selling doomed pets to researchers sells off a little of our humanity - at $30 a living body.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Fred Glienna Contributing writer