BREAKING the CYCLE: The Animal Welfare Imperative

‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ – Benjamin Franklin

As a strategist and problem solver in the Corporate world, I was always somewhat dumbfounded by the degree to which problem-solving was directed rather simplistically at symptoms rather than root causes, effectively only solving part of the problem, or solving it only for a short time, or causing other problems that negated the solution anyway.

Animal Welfare SA suffers the same malaise. Many organisations and individuals focus on rescue, rehabilitation and rehoming, and of course there is a necessity that somebody do this, since there are so many homeless animals. This is an attempt at finding, for each animal, a ‘cure’ – a home in which they can live happy lives.  If we recruited more people to welfare, could we home more animals? That very much depends on whether there would be a market for them, and that would depend on whether more people could be convinced to adopt a shelter dog rather than buy a puppy from a pet shop or a breeder. There are many public preconceptions in this regard and this would not happen overnight, but let’s assume that this was possible.

The question we would have to ask is, “How many more workers would it take to solve the problem?”. Let’s remember that for every ten animals born, ONE finds a home. So potentially we would have to have the effect of homing 9 times more animals, or increase our effectiveness by 900% While this may well be achieved by an increase in resources of less than that, it’s not likely to be much less. To complicate matters, the human population is increasing, and that leads us to the real issue we must combat.

When we find an animal a home, effectively bringing about a ‘cure’ for that animal, we have no effect whatsoever on the root cause of the problem, which problem may be defined as, “There are more animals than homes”. This is definitively an outcome, a result, a SYMPTOM. It is not a cause. When we home an animal, we alter the symptom, but have no effect on the events leading to it merely by homing an animal. The Animal Welfare Imperative cannot be to rescue, rehabilitate and rehome in perpetuity, since the job is just going to get bigger and it will grow faster than the resource base can be increased to deal with it. How can I say this? Because the human population is increasing and that has an effect on animal populations. If the welfare community expands at the same rate or better, but at a rate slower than the human population in this country, the problem will become too large to cope with. I think we’re already at that stage. The shelters are full and yet the animals keep coming, partly because the situation is now worsened by economic conditions, emigration and by-laws limiting animal populations in individual homes.

So our ‘pound of cure’ is not the solution. It’s not the solution partially because the aggregates of supply and demand say so, but also because some welfare organisations themselves contribute to the problem. More organisations than you know release animals to adopters without sterilising them and rely on the integrity of the adopter to ensure that the process is completed. In many cases, a proper home check does not get done, and effectively it means that instead of shutting the door so that the next phase of cycle cannot be continued, they leave it ajar, and we know human nature to default to doing what is easiest; the chances are the animal will not be sterilised, the effect will be another unwanted litter, and we effectively create a positive feedback loop that starts the cycle again. Even worse, the lack of the home check opens the door to neglect and abuse: people will always put their best face forward when seeking to adopt an animal but this does not mean they should be trusted. To rely on personal intuition in this regard is just stupid – intuition is proven to be the weakest of human faculties. Organisations should the homework and make sure; The happiness of an entire generation of animals depends on getting this part of the equation right. The greatest contribution to the long-term solution that welfare workers can make is to stop the cycle through sterilisation and comprehensive home checks.

So how are we to address this problem, if the ‘band-aid’ of more rescuers will not do it?

It should be obvious that we need to reduce or stop the inputs into the system, not try to manage the outputs, if we want to have a sustainable impact. It should also be obvious that sterilisation is the key, but that would be a simplistic problem statement, since we could then argue that getting more organisations doing sterilisation would solve the problem, and it won’t.  Once again, the increase in capacity would have to be dramatic and simply unrealistic.

There are a number of factors which, if targeted collectively, will have a lasting  impact on the problem. They are focused on prevention, a 125 year maxim of the SPCA who somehow, in all that time, have not managed to find solutions for the indiscriminate breeding problem:

Ignorance of the Public – Education regarding treatment of animals and  consequences of breeding at home will correct this, but it’s a long-term project and there are not nearly enough organisations involved in this process. It’s a difficult job, too, requiring special skills.

Legislation – Sterilisation should be enforced, although I am not sure that blanket sterilisation on its own is a useful strategy unless the problem of the costs of sterilisation can be addressed. Government must be lobbied to enact sterilisation laws. The scope of such an initiative is beyond any single organisation since there needs to be consensus among many organisations if we wish to sway Government.

Policing – If the police have ‘more important issues to attend to’, then who will police animal issues? Is this not an argument for creating a body who will do this job and be empowered by Government with authority? This will not be achievable by any one organisation; it requires many acting in concert under one unified set of criteria and under one umbrella identity.

Cost of Sterilisation – Government must be lobbied to subsidise sterilisation at least in the short term. Innovations like the male injectable sterilisation could be implemented in the meantime. This outcome will be easier to impact by a representative body than by individual organisations.

Only if this combination of factors are addressed at the same time to varying degrees will sustainable solutions be found to our chronic problems, and none of them are achievable by single organisations acting independently.

The Welfare Imperative in the long term is not to ‘Rescue More’, it is to ‘Make Rescue Unnecessary’.

An ounce of education, legislation, policing and sterilisation is worth a pound of rescue.

 

Derek

The Hopeful Foundation